


So Sweet and Delicious I Become

by Hagen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Archaeology, Ben Is a Rich Bitch, Blood and Violence, Extortion, F/M, Food Kink, Gun Violence, Is Money Kink a Thing, Italian Mafia, Italy, Museums, Rey Is a Not-So-Rich Bitch, Roman mythology, Rome - Freeform, Sex Toys, Sicilian Mafia, Sicily - Freeform, Wealth, artefacts - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-05-20 12:48:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19377031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagen/pseuds/Hagen
Summary: Benito Organa has clawed his way up the mafia ladder, journey made ever more difficult by his unsavoury parentage. Now he rules brutally over business both illicit and lawful with an iron fist, and remains unchallenged.Rey Niima has battled poverty and injustice for a position as assistant curator at a university museum, honing her passion for archaeology and antiquity; a position she takes seriously, and will defend at all costs.





	1. Homo Homini Lupus Est

**Author's Note:**

> “ **So sweet and delicious do I become,**  
>  when I am in bed with a man  
> who, I sense, loves and enjoys me,  
> that the pleasure I bring excels all delight,  
> so the knot of love, however tight  
> it seemed before, is tied tighter still.”
> 
> ― _Veronica Franco, 1500s (year unknown)_
> 
>  
> 
> **"Homo homini lupus est. / Man, to man, is a wolf."**
> 
>  
> 
> ― _Titus Maccius Plautus, 195 B.C.E._
> 
>  **Il Prologo** \- Prologue
> 
>  
> 
> Playlist, by chapter
> 
>  
> 
> hi im back on my bullshit with my first ever modern au listen to the playlist pls

          

 

 

 

_Il Prologo_

 

In Sicily, the dry air fills your mouth with cotton on a summer day.

 

The blood comes up around the sole of Ben’s shoe. It is darker and deeper than the blood spattered across his shirt, his jacket, his trousers. He doesn’t like that, but he will never wear a cheap suit - would rather die, kneecapped in the sun - to save better ones from being dirtied, even when he _knows_ they will be dirtied. 

 

This house is pretty, stolen, and paid for with Ben’s money. He will never understand, as he looks at heavy burgundy curtains and veined white marble and spies a lemon tree through the sash window, why people do it. He will never understand why, no matter how he provides, there will always be such entitlement amongst those beneath him. 

 

This man sits in one of his own teak dining chairs for his crimes, cable-tied and bloody. Hux is leaning against the door to the kitchen, and Bazine sits on the table, clothes crisp and impeccable and bloodless.

 

The high ceilings are frescoed like a chapel, blue-pink-white, soft and perfect.  

 

Ben babied this man once. He regrets it now, though he feels more inconvenienced than betrayed. The man’s place in the _Carabinieri_ and position in the state police made him tolerable for a time, placated with a palazzo and acres of land and more money than ever he could have spent, while Ben took fierce hold of the reins of Sicily’s law.

 

This man embarrassed Ben deeply. **CHIEF OF POLICE SUSPECT IN ROME SEX WORKER CASE** had stared him in the face over breakfast. He stared at the headline for so long that the letters began to shift and blur, and cast his granita across the kitchen in rage like a child. 

 

The headline was misleading. The next day’s was more concise. **CHIEF OF POLICE RELEASED ON BAIL.** The article detailed a story that Ben didn’t find uncommon; a middle-aged man in a position of power finds himself elevated further, protected by coin and bullet, and has his wax wings melted by the sun. **CHIEF OF POLICE HINTS AT MAFIA INVOLVEMENT IN SEX CASE.** Ben raged for hours at this lie.

 

The prostitute in Rome had waived her anonymity to speak out and disclose innermost details of her assault, and thus, naturally, was met with the full fury of the scorned _Polizia di Stato,_ forcing her into hiding. 

 

Ben came home to Sicily, found the man, and kneecapped him in his pretty dining room.

 

“I read the papers. Always. In the morning, I have my _granita_ and I read the papers. I like the chocolate one - I’m like a child, but I love it.” Ben watches the bloodied chest rise and fall, the destroyed knees and shins shift pathetically on the marble floor. A woman’s heeled shoes could click beautifully on this floor. 

 

“On Monday, I woke up, I had my granita, and I read the papers. You made a fool of me, Marcello.”

 

“Benito,” he gasps. Ben’s brow twitches, and the man’s words hitch on the forbidden familiarity even in death. “ _Signore …_ please.”

 

“You made a fool of me. Do you think I want these things on my name, Marcello?”

 

“No, no - _signore, per favore -_ no-”

 

“And yet-” Ben gestures around the dining room. “Still you did.”

 

The room is iron, gunpowder and blood lingering under his nostrils like Vick’s. Dead men always beg.

 

“You brought this to me - this shame, this _shit_. Perverts have no place in my family, Marcello. That woman is hiding like a rat because of you. And then - you say my name, thinking I won’t see it.”

 

He has a pancake holster across his wide ribs, under his blood-spattered shirt, and removes his jacket to get at it Bazine takes it from him. Ben unbuttons his shirt. Above the flat holster he wears a solid chain of Sicilian gold. In the holster is a .22 P226, loaded.

 

Marcello sees, and the shattered legs scrabble a little quicker.

 

“ _Per favore_ … my sons.”

 

Both dead; one shot cleanly through the back of the head in his cherry Testarossa on the outskirts of Palermo, and the other gut-shot on the palazzo’s long drive as he sat on the back of a racehorse, spoiling his polo uniform with blood and muck as the horse bolted in terror.

 

Ben’s expression does not change, but his eyes and hands do, and the man stares at him. He realises. _Clunk-click._ His thick finger rests on the trigger. The sun shines through the sash window and glares off Ben’s gold ring. 

 

The gun fires. A dove shoots off the lemon tree outside in a flurry of white. A trickle of red snakes from his nostril, wells in his philtrum, spills over and joins the blood of his mouth. Another trickle, from the smoking hole between his eyes, joins it. He dies without taking his eyes from Ben’s face.

 

Benito Organa is on a plane to another home within the hour.

 

In Sicily, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.


	2. Denarius

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wolf steals silver | Fox chases gold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi here's 9k + rey!
> 
> side note: Organa is just the name I'll stick on the crime family. Sounds better and Skywalker is not gonna work. Sue me, I'm lazy.

    In New York, the winter wind bites at your cheek like a new knife.

 

    Ben is a mongrel.

 

    He doesn’t say that to himself. It’s a term laid upon him, most often when he was a child and a burgeoning adolescent. Sometimes his dealings have said it; kneecapped men try it in favour of begging for their lives: **fucking mongrel -** **_stronzo Irlandese-_ ** **half-breed** **_bastardo_ ** **-** **_meticcio brutto._ **It never lasts long, but when Ben was young and becoming a man it’d bite him like a cold wind.

 

Ben gazes out of the car window as it speeds toward Palermo Internazionale.

 

    Mama is Sicilian, brown-eyed, skin like gold in the summer. Han is from Boston - deep Irish - where the biting wind blows in cold and brings with it the stinging chill of the Atlantic. It brought the Irish on its sharp wind, too, when they were starved out, and like the Sicilians, the most ambitious amongst them took charge of the wild streets.

 

                 Leia is short - barely up to his shoulder. Her hair has always been long, brown in her youth, though as she nears her fiftieth decade it has greyed. She keeps it in tasteful, wound braids at the back of her head. Her large brown eyes - eyes Ben inherited from her - were ever-bright, never dull.

 

              Han is paler, fairer in hair and skin and hazel eyes. In his youth, when the sun shined on his head, he could have been taken for ginger.

 

             Mama is the image of _her_ Mama - brown-eyed and slender and heartbreakingly beautiful - but her Papa was undoubtedly Germanic. Ben has seen the pictures; his grandfather on his wedding day in the 1940s, smile immovable. He was a stocky Milanese farm boy born so close to the border that he almost stank of snow. The pictures are greyscale, but Mama told Ben that he was tall and grey-eyed and truly fair, hair the colour of straw, skin only tanned because of the sun. One eye seemed to slant into the distance, but this seemed only to enhance his charm.

 

              This unusual mix of Goidelic ice and Mediterranean warmth made Ben a distinctly odd-looking, lanky boy and a bulky, exotically-featured man. He is Sicilian without olive skin - thick, curly black hair; big, sloping nose; dark, deep-set eyes; sensual full lips. He is Irish without pale eyes - six feet and four inches tall; long-and-thick-limbed, wide shoulders and hard belly like a bull; skin northern-white. He tans in the summers, slightly, and pales into Carrera by the first autumn winds.

 

               Ben remembered a photograph of his grandparents some months after the birth of their children. They were both unsmiling. His grandmother was somber and angry, his grandfather newly scarred from hairline to just below his left eye. The Palermo mafia had scarred his face for his refusal to supply them with access to road frontage on the land where he kept sheep and cows.

 

They had threatened Anacino’s wife and his children, to which he had reacted by taking the offending _soldato_ by his greasy black hair and thrust his knee so fiercely into his nose that the man was given a permanent speech impediment and a limp. They held him down and scarred him viciously for that, promising _vendetta._ His grandfather took a hunting rifle, went to his bedroom window, and shot them all one-by-one as they retreated.

 

He took Padmé with him as he grew feared and respected. His children grew up in luxury, but were never allowed to forget the value of working for one’s wealth.

 

                 Ben is twenty-nine. Sicilians believe fiercely in family, in marriage, in children. Ben’s parents were never married, his father is not a Sicilian, and Ben was born out of wedlock. The rigged game began from the very start.

  


                                       -----------------------------

  


               Mama came to America with her mama and her papa when she was nine. She has a twin - a brother named Luca - but he disengaged himself from his family as soon as he could and threw himself into study, and ultimately, hiding. The Organa name - and his nonna’s maiden name, Amidala, because of her father - were already feared, already respected.

 

              Ben never met his _nonno,_ but he remembers his _nonna,_ remembers the pictures of her that she would show him - proper glamour  headshots from the late fifties, ethereal and impossible in black and white. She would lay a table of food whenever her only grandchild visited her rooms - an entire home, extended off of the Brooklyn townhouse - and she would tell him stories of Sicily. She would take him in the back of her chauffeur-driven car to the city and into the Sicilian neighbourhoods. Padmé would only shop in Sicilian groceries, would only purchase clothes from Sicilian tailors, and would only, when he was with her, allow her grandson to eat in Sicilian restaurants and delicatessens. He was too young at the time to understand that Padmé still walked feared and intimidated through the _paesane_ neighbourhoods of New York, as she had alongside her husband when they crossed the sea.

 

            He was also too young to truly understand the system of bastardy. It was not as much of an issue when he was a child as it could have been; he was very gentle and tottered after his Mama and Nonna wherever they went, endearing even the hardest of Catholics. It was as he became a man and became a threat to titles and inheritances and territory that his unmarried birth would become  a problem; a weakness.

 

             At fifty-seven, Anacino Organa was shot dead by the Irish Mob,  upon whose territory and tradelines he had encroached, before Ben was born. What followed could only be described as a war of vengeance. Padmé bayed for blood. Anyone known to be embroiled in the assassination plot of her husband was brutally dispatched, and rarely with mercy. It was a great irony that only Anacino’s murder provided Padmé with the respect and the fear that he had once wielded.

 

            Xenophobia became one of Padmé’s traits. She loathed the Irish, every last one, and when she prayed for her husband’s soul she cursed the Mob to hell.

 

          She had to deal with them even so. The Irish Mob were too close to her tradelines to ignore. When the time came for her to bring them to her home for negotiations, she sat on her bed and prayed to Anacino for forgiveness, to forgive her for bringing these drunken savages into the home he had built for them.

 

                 Mama fell pregnant at twenty. Han Solo was a _saighdiúr -_ the Irish equivalent of the Sicilian _soldato_ \- and had been present in the Brooklyn townhouse of the Organa family when Padmé held trade and territory negotiations with the Mob. Ben’s Mama told him that she had never seen such a beautiful boy in all her life; so _pale,_ golden-freckled, hair almost red. Han’s family were new immigrants, too, and he had not yet lost the brogue of the old country.

 

                 Within months of the beginning of their affair, Mama was pregnant. Padmé raged. Mama recounted to Ben the day she had finally confessed her pregnancy to her mother, and how Padmé had seized a wooden spoon from one of the maids and laid it across Leia’s shoulders still dirtied with pasta sauce.   _If your father was alive, he’d send you to a convent! How could you give yourself to one of those drunken louts? They murdered your father in the street! Haven’t I taught you better, raised you better? The child will be a bastard, and an Irish bastard, at that!_

 

              Han Solo did not marry Leia, but a child was not to be ignored, and Leia refused to give her child up. Padmé’s family was indelibly tied to the Irish. She loathed this, and provided Han Solo with the absolute barest of icy courtesies whenever she was forced to interact with him. He was not kind to her either. Leia ended her relationship with Han when Ben was three, and he is sure that Padmé felt a smug satisfaction at that. Han made little effort to see his son - purposeful, to incentivize Leia to come back to him - and so Ben loathed him.

 

                   When Ben became Don Organa, the head of the family as his mother, grandmother, and grandfather had been before him, Leia went back to Han. Throughout Ben’s childhood and adolescence, unbeknownst to him, they had corresponded by phone and by letter, and rekindled the love by which Ben had been conceived. Leia had the great colonial brownstone of her dreams, now, in one of Han’s wealthy Irish neighbourhoods in Manhattan. Ben loathed his father for his callousness towards his beloved _nonna_ and his intentional absenteeism, and so looked with disdain upon his father’s attempts to know him again in recent years.

 

                    Padmé was old when Ben knew her, once-beautiful face deeply lined, voice gravelled from a lifetime of cigarette smoking. She did not believe the anti-smoking research of the nineties, and smoked even in her seventieth decade. No matter her age or her aches or ailments, she dressed impeccably, used to luxury and wealth, though in her later years she would substitute extravagance for comfort. She died at seventy-seven of lung cancer. Ben was nine, and heartbroken.

 

                    Her English had been broken and clumsy, but Ben had no need of it. He was raised in Italian and English - even some Irish, though out of matrilineal pride and absence of native speakers in the States, he rarely used it - and so was entranced by her stories, her ways, her habits in a language he would always know.

 

        

                                                 ----------------------

  


    New York is almost twelve hours from Palermo.

               

                Ben likes to drive himself, but on this occasion conceded to a chauffeured Maserati, black with tinted windows, that brought him to the private hangar of Palermo’s airport, impressive for the size of the country. The driver is one of Mama’s, and he speeds. Ben is not worried about the police. Though it is eight in the evening in the middle of October, the heat lingers, pressing deep into his face like yearning hands.

 

              He wants to change his bloodied suit and wash the exhilaration from his face. Hux and Bazine are waiting by the ascending steps to the jet - sleek, black, visually brandless, holds thirty but today will only hold five. The jet was Mama’s, but now it is Ben’s, too. Mama flies far less frequently, something Ben does not understand. Too long in America and he finds himself itching for heat and fat lemons and towns built into the bony brown cliffs.

 

              Mama had the jet converted when Ben was just a teenager, installed with small - jets are only so big - but enjoyable luxuries like a shower, a bar, a kitchen. His body aches for hot water.

 

             Armando Hux is a pale Venetian, red-haired, not unusual in such northerly climes. He is one of Ben’s _caporegime -_ odd for an unrelated individual and even odder for a non-Sicilian, but his loyalty and brutal efficiency compensates - along with Bazine Netal, a Milanese cousin of his mother, with a sharp Teutonic face and black hair in a glossy, blade-sharp bob. They are clad in black both, clothes tactical as well as expensive, and armed with blade and bullet.

 

                 Ben can barely hear over the roar of the jet and the _wheeeeooooooosh_ of commercial aircraft taking off from the mainstream hangars beyond. “ _Salute, signore,”_ Hux says tersely in northern-accented Italian, pale green eyes darting about behind Ben. “ _Il Polizia di Stato_ are searching for the chief’s murderer already. Best we be quick.”

 

                “Let them search. They’ll be in my pocket soon enough.”

 

                “ _Sì, signore,”_ he says, but he does not sound convinced.

 

                 The jet’s pilot is Mama’s, too - wholly trusted and thoroughly vetted, on pain of death, naturally. Ben has made him nervous since he became a man, eyes wolfish and searching, gaze uncomfortable. When Ben ascends the jet’s steps and enters its sleek interior, the pilot greets him and his bloody suit with the barest tremble in his voice and a shine on his forehead.

 

               Ben showers once the jet is in the air. He peels off his bloodied suit and grunts as he unstraps the holster, rubbing at the fine red welts that the Velcro left on his skin. It feels odd, no matter how much he does it, to be naked and wet a thousand metres high. He does not remove the golden chain about his thick neck. He rarely does.

 

             He scrubs the blood from his chest and arms where it soaked through his shirt and runs the holster marks under the hot water until they heal and rise. He shampoos his hair and runs it through with condition to set, then rinses clear.

 

           Ben goes naked to the sink to brush his teeth and stands still, holding its porcelain edges, as the plane tilts and settles. He looks at himself in the mirror.

          

          He’s tall, wide. Regular exercise has been a part of Benito Organa’s life since he was a child; Mama insisted on horseriding - something she did as a girl, riding the cowherd horses across the brown hills with Anacino - and various spats of organised sports; lacrosse, soccer, athletics. Ben found himself most taken with athletics, and continues it still. Combined with regular weight-training, a Sicilian appetite,  and a natural disposition to excellent muscle tone, he is large and solid, as hard and as immovable as a statue.

 

                 The washroom is small and he is large, but it is doable, and he changes into fresh clothes. He will not wear a suit on such a long flight, and so changes into slate,  pressed slacks that fit comfortably to the contours of his thighs and a knitted black turtleneck that clings to the thick lines of his broad chest and back. He adjusts his chain so that it sits under the slightly gathered cashmere neck. He exchanges black Prada dress shoes for brown Louboutin oxfords. Black on black, in men’s fashion, is disgusting. He learned that from his _nonna_.

 

    Ben emerges; the door is hydraulic and automatic. The sun is setting as they fly over the Mediterranean sea, vibrantly orange on the cerulean water, wisps of brilliant pink cloud sitting over its glare.

 

              He sits by the window in a brown, leather-upholstered seat big enough for three, and from his case produces his laptop, a wafer of grey steel. Bazine sits across from him with a tablet, sharp legs crossed, and says, “They’ve released a statement.”

 

            “Oh?”

 

           “‘No suspects in Marcello Brunacci murder at this time, investigation ongoing _.’”_

 

      “ _Bene._ ”

 

          “So quickly,” Hux muses. He is sitting across the aisle. One of the jet’s features are legless teak tables that fold down from a slim chink in the wall at the press of a button. Upon his table he has the components of his Glock carefully placed on a soft cloth, and is cleaning it diligently. “Did you have a hand in that, _signore_?”

 

          “My mother did,” Ben says, and opens his laptop. His password is long, obscure, and regularly changed. _Four unread emails._ “She pulled her strings with the media.” He did not know outright, but she always did it for him.

 

           There is a woman working the bar. Bazine gets up. “Drink, _signore?_ ”

 

      “No, _grazie._ ” He opens the email.

 

     “Hux, you want a drink?”

 

     “Espresso.”

 

    “ _Micio,_ ” she chuckles, and stalks towards the bar.

 

     Ben reads the first email. The sun has set beneath the sea.

 

      _Benito,_

 

_Luca rang me earlier - he got a shipment of coins in. He can post them or you can go and fetch them. If you go, be polite, and bring me back something nice._

 

_xoxo_

 

_Mama_

 

The other three are from various business associates. He replies diligently to them all. Bazine returns with an espresso for Hux and Scotch for herself. A solitary flight attendant offers them a dinner menu. All three decline.

 

    An hour into the flight, Ben crosses his long legs, turns his chair towards the horizon through the window, and sleeps. When he is awake - it feels like moments later -  they are halfway across the black Atlantic. He stares at the vast expanse of it through the little window for a moment. He hears Bazine shifting in her seat. She goes to the end of the plane, leans into the cockpit, and returns. She leans over his armrest and says, six hours in, “Pilot says there’s six hours left, _signore_.”

 

    _Shit,_ he thinks. _Was I asleep that long?_

 

“ _Va bene._ ” He waves her away. “I’ll go back to sleep.”

 

    Ben doesn’t sleep. He takes out his laptop again. When the flight attendant comes around again he asks for a bottle of water, as close to frozen as it can get without being solid. He’s not going to sleep; he’s going to shop.

 

    Benito Organa is a passionate creature.

 

    He has a passion for his work, for power. He has a passion for women, for sex, has done since his adolesence. He has a passion for sport and performance.

 

                Rome is fallen and millennia have passed since the death of the last worshipper of the Greek Pantheon, but the legacy remains. Padmé was a fierce believer in the strength of one’s heritage, and taught Mama the same, and _she_ taught Ben, albeit with slightly less passion than her mother before her. As a child he was taken to the Roman amphitheatre in Catania, and Padmé told him the stories she had learned from books and tongue, about Nero and the gladiators and the two brothers, Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf.

 

    As a grown man, Ben is fascinated by the accessibility of antiquity. He does not believe in the private purchase of ancient places, so as to conceal them from the descendants of their builders - he actively discourages it, and uses his influence where necessary to stamp out the notions where they arise -  but considers himself a collector of forgotten Greco-Roman artefacts in circulation in the Western world. At home in Sicily and in New York, he keeps a great room of curiosities; armless statues of white marble; weapons once wielded by gladiators and legionaries; rings of carnelian and emerald and lapis lazuli so elaborately crafted that even modern goldsmiths struggle to comprehend the metallurgy behind its creation.

 

    Ben has a slew of online dealers willing to sell him items of antiquity, but precious few are verified to be genuine. Ben likes authenticity.

 

    His mother’s twin, Luca - though in an attempt to disconnect himself further from his family he simply goes by Luke - curates a small university museum four hours north of his family home in Brooklyn, in Boston, Massachusetts. Mama tells Ben that Luke’s focus is natural prehistory, and when items of classical antiquity come into his hands, he sees no need for them. Mama is the only person in his family that Luke did not cut off entirely. They meet monthly for lunch. Mama’s connections have kept the university museum alive and allowed for its expansion.

 

The arrangement began long ago; Luke contacts Mama when an artefact comes into his hands, Mama notifies Ben, and Ben pays Luke for it. He had little contact with his uncle as a child as does not intend to start now. This is simply business; simply a passion.

 

Nothing personal.

 

    The jet lands in JFK International at one o’ clock in the morning. It’s still as busy as it would be at noon. There’s a car waiting by the hangar, chauffeured by another one of Mama’s trusted drivers. Hux goes with Ben; Bazine lingers, needed elsewhere by Leia.

 

             Hux sits in the back with Ben, eyes trained on anything that could be perceived as a threat. Such is the nature of a don and his caporegime; drive-by attacks, particularly between two vehicles, are rare but not unheard of. Hux is an expert shot. He needs to be.

 

            New York never sleeps. The lights pulse - _red yellow green blue yellow green red yellow purple yellow red blue blue purple yellow red red red -_ and the constant _beep_ and _bip_ of taxi cabs is like white noise, now. He misses the quiet hilly stillness of Sicily already.

 

          “I’m going to Boston tomorrow,” he tells Hux. “I’ll go alone. Take the day off.”

 

         “ _Sì, signore.”_

 

        His phone rings a minute from home. Ben lives in the old Organa townhouse in Brooklyn Heights; two brownstones knocked through to make one enormous dwelling. Once it housed Anacino, Padmé, Luca, Leia, their consigliere, their caporegime and their soldati. Now it’s just Ben. He likes it that way.

 

    “ _Ci_ a _o,_ Mama.”

 

    “Hello, _bellissimo._ You did well. I made a few calls when things got rowdy.”

 

    “ _Grazie_ , Mama, I saw.” Mama has the phone on loudspeaker. She’s cooking; he hears her chopping as she speaks.

 

              “Why are you chopping, Mama? It’s nearly two in the morning.”

       

             “Midnight cravings. I wanted pasta. Did you get my email?”

 

    “Yeah, on the plane. I’ll go home and sleep and drive up there in the morning.”

 

    “You don’t have to, _caro_ , he can post it to you.”

 

    “It’s okay, Mama, I want to. I miss my car.”

 

There is a pause, static crunching. “Have you spoken to your father?”

 

    “No. I don’t intend to.”

 

    “You should. He worries about you, _bello._ ”

 

    There’s another silence. Ben hears a throat clearing in the background and feels a hot flush of rage.

 

  “He shouldn’t. Tell him to stop fucking listening in on your calls. What is he, twelve? _Stronzo fottuto_.”

 

    “Benito,” Leia says sharply. “Don’t.”

 

    The car pulls up to the black gates. The stony Roman wolves stand sentinel over the driveway.

 

    “I gotta go, Mama. Call me later when you aren’t being wiretapped.” He hangs up before she can respond, rolls down the window, and leans towards the intercom.

 

    “Organa Residence; may I help you?” comes the English voice from the P.A., and Ben snorts.

 

“You’re not gonna let me into my own house?”

 

“Master Benito! You didn’t say!”

 

The gates slide up. Ben makes his way up the driveway, journey lit by old-fashioned street-lamps; his mother’s choice.

 

His consigliere has a long English name. Ben has called him Threepio since he was a child; an old homage to the man’s reference number, when Mama was brutally interviewing candidates for an _au pair_ position and a butler position. Only the best would do for her Benito, who was reared in comfort but never spoilt. _87A2C3P0._ Mama was ruthless, but liked the effeminate, groomed twenty-four-year-old Englishman so much that she gave him both jobs. Han objected fiercely to this, Catholic rage spewing from his Galway mouth, and insisted that he would not have a homosexual care for his young son, let alone an Englishman. Ben could laugh at the religious irony of it now.

 

              Threepio has long since been relieved of his duties as a nanny, but amongst his obligations as _consigliere_ finds time to bring his grown-up charge coffees and lunches and often still cleans the kitchen out of habit. Ben came to him when Mama went back to Han and asked the honour of him. Threepio accepted immediately.

 

    A consigliere advises the don, and is counsellor and mediator, especially where matters of war are concerned. Padmé’s consigliere was a woman named Mothma whose Christian name Ben never learned, and Mama’s was a tall, rangy man named Benito Kenobi, after whom Ben was named.

 

    Ben’s luggage is ported away by the maid. Hux retreats to his quarters.

 

Ben makes do with this townhouse. It is an enormous property. Mama tried her best to give it airs of home, but she loves America and its grandiose, colonial houses and manicured little city garden.  The floors are wood and marble, and the walls red brick; a home built for revolution and deep winters. Ben misses sunbaked brick and atriums and the deep heat of the wild Sicilian hills. He has cats in the Organa palazzo in Sicily - beautiful, sleek things - that come and go as they please, but always come running, mewling, when their master returns, sporadic as it might be.

 

Threepio sits him in the great American kitchen and lights the great American stove and makes carbonara at two in the morning. Ben sips a granita and tears at a doughy focaccia, studded with baked olives.

   

“He was a fucking nuisance. I don’t give a fuck about his police.” The television is on, and the news is detailing the assassination with far less shocked vigour than before. Threepio glances at the screen.

 

“Did your mother contact the media?” He’s frying chopped pancetta and garlic  in olive oil in a great copper-bottomed pan. The smell makes Ben’s stomach growl after twelve hours of nothing. He fills his mouth with bread.

 

“Someone below her did on her orders, I guess. The storm died down pretty quickly. Not sure what she said, but I doubt it was pretty. _Grazie_ ,” Ben says, as Threepio sets the dish in front of him, piled high with creamy pasta, _guanciale,_ black pepper, and sharp Parmigiano. “I gotta go up to Boston tomorrow.”

 

Threepio fixes himself a smaller dish. “Already?” He is a tall, lean man, still blonde though he is almost fifty-five.

 

Ben stifles the urge to wolf the pasta down like a beast. “Yeah, Mama rang. Luke has a set of coins up in the museum. I think I’ll take a drive up there tomorrow and get them, you know, get out of the house.”

 

“You’re only just back! He can post them.”

 

“I know, but I miss my car. I want to go see what else he has up there. Maybe I’ll get into rocks. Anything happen while I was gone?”

 

“The usual. Trouble with the Irish. Your mother made Han sort it.” Threepio was delicate when discussing Han; saying ‘your father’ made Benito twitch.

 

Threepio loads the dishwasher. Ben asks, “You going to bed?”

 

“I was about to. Are you?”

 

“In a while. I’ll get the lights when I’m going, don’t worry. ‘Night, Threepio.”

 

He’s left alone in the kitchen. He eats the rest of the carbonara, idly watching the news reports of the _terrible assassination_ in Palermo. When he grows bored with that, he finishes the pasta, loads the dishwasher, and carries a Toblerone around the house as if refamiliarising himself with it. He goes to his bedroom; grandiose but rustic, a great Sicilian master bedroom. The walls are stone to the east and wood to the wed, the enormous bed guarded by a granite arch, relieved from the wall. His bureau is neatened and his expansive closet through one door to the left of it, his mosaic bathroom to the right. He throws himself onto the bed. Often Mama has grilled him over taking a wife - “we aren’t going to be a family for long if you don’t.” - but he doesn’t like that kind of talk.

 

Tomorrow, he will drive to Boston for his coins, and get back to work.

  


   

                                        ----------------------

  


    “Rey, have you got that invoice?”

 

    “Which invoice?”

 

    “For the molars.”

 

    Rey pulls it out of the folder. By nature she is messy in her own environment, but she’s nigh on obsessive here; anything to stay in favour, anything to _keep_ the damned job. Her desk is spotless, her punctuality faultless - even the files are arranged within perfect reach of her fingertips.

 

    “Right here.”

 

    Luke is typing. “How much were they without tax?”

 

    “One-thousand-four-hundred-and-seventy-two dollars and sixty-five cents.”

 

    “With tax?”

 

    “One-thousand-five-hundred-and-sixty dollars exactly.”

 

    He scribbles. “Fucking hell. For a couple of teeth.”

 

    She laughs. Luke shakes his head. “Well, here’s a big ‘fuck you’ to Siberia Bone Traders Inc. You want coffee?”

 

    Rey Niima is twenty, and has been poor all her life.

 

The last six months have been the exception to that. Rey was born into nothing; her parents were more interested in methamphetamines and domestic violence than their child, and so at three years old Rey was discovered alone in a feces-covered apartment, so cold she was blue, by law enforcement notified of the property by complaints of a child crying.

 

  She became the state’s problem, then, and until she was eighteen she was moved from childrens’  home to childrens’ home. She drank, smoked, had sex, and stole, and was dumped out on her ass at eighteen, where the money she had made from pawning an expensive (stolen) watch paid for a deposit on a shitty apartment in a shitty block in a shitty neighbourhood in a shitty part of Boston. Welfare barely covered the rent and bills _and_ food.

 

              Rey had always been curious about what came before. In one of the homes she had stayed in, there had been a shelf of books about giant animals that walked the earth when the world was all ice, and about caves in Europe full of bones that were human, but not quite, and paintings of snow lions so vicious they seemed to leap off the wall and swipe at you. She stole these books, and has never parted with them.

 

           Her landlord is a fat, slimy Polish fucker named Unkar Plutt. He raises and drops the rent as is convenient to him - mostly to draw people in to his properties, trap them, then make a profit - but Rey is glad he has little interest in her as a person; just her money. When the rent rose sharply last time, Rey was faced with three choices; homelessness, jail, or a job.

 

           It is not as if she has never searched for a job before. Potential employers like her wide smile and her genial manner, but then they look at her address and her history, and that’s it.  Somewhere along the way, Rey gave up.

 

        There is a woman living in the apartment below her in conditions even more dilapidated than Rey. She is a sex worker and a drug addict. Often Rey is kept up all night by the sound of dramatic, ugly moaning. Mara Jade has dyed red hair and roots six inches long and arms full of needle-tracks. She often stands at her front door and smoked and says to Rey as she passes, “Hey, you could make money doing what I do, you know. You’re real pretty. Just keep it on the down-low.”

 

        Mara Jade isn’t ugly, just drugged out and fucked up. She’s a nice lady, though, and gave Rey a (stolen) Swiss army knife and a packet of Honey Buns when she moved in.

 

      Rey’s not ugly either, just poor. She’s tall as women go, long-limbed, but too slender for her height. She’s wiry with the strength of the street, and small-breasted, but she has beautiful even teeth and shapely lips. Her nose is snub and small. Not ugly, she always tells herself. Just poor.

 

        Rey knows what Mara Jade meant. If pimps caught wind of her freelancing from her own apartment, they’d try to hook her on meth to take control of her money, and beat her half to death if she refused. She always mutters, “No, thanks,” and brushes past up the stairs.

 

             Before, she often went to the park - for the shittiness of the rest of the districts, the city kept the park reasonably nice - and walked the track over and over. It had once had an outdoor gym that was destroyed by vandals within weeks of its erection. The city stopped replacing it after the fourth time, and now it was just weird soft tarmac like the stuff flooring kids’ play areas. There were ducks and waterhens and two big swans a pond there that came and sat by her if she stayed still enough. Once, she had given her pretzel crumbs to the ducks, and a swan came out of the pond in demand of some, too. Rey shook the bag at it to scare it away, and in response it thumped her so hard with its wing that she was bruised down her thigh for a month.

 

           Six months ago, on her way to the park, she saw an advertisement in a bodega’s window. It was recent - the rest of the papers were yellowed and dirty with age.

 

_Washington University of Boston Museum assistant wanted. Full-time. Contact Luke Organa for further information._

 

     Rey went in, tore a number strip off the page, and went to the nearest payphone. Luke was genial, friendly, and invited her for an interview the next day.

 

           She went to a dollar store and stole a packet of tooth-whitening strips, a cheap nude lipstick, and a big, dark tortoiseshell hairclip. When she went home, Mara Jade was outside her door smoking.

 

           “Hey, what’d you get?”

 

          “Teeth shit and some lipstick. Hairclip.” Rey showed her. “I have a job interview tomorrow.”

 

         “Oh, no shit! What are you gonna wear?”

 

        “I don’t know yet.”

 

        “Hold on a sec.” Mara Jade turned on her heel and disappeared into her apartment. Every light in the place had been covered in red or pink cloth. It smelled of chemically cheap perfume and smoke and rotting food. Mara Jade came back with a pile of clothes

 

       “I wore these when I worked at that clothes place. Keep ‘em, I’m not using them.”

 

        Rey gave her half the packet of whitening strips and the lipstick as payment. When she inspected the clothes - black work pants and a plain navy blouse -  at home they just smelled smoky - thank _fuck_ \- and though they were a little loose on her skinny frame, it was nothing that couldn’t be remedied with a few safety pins.

 

             The museum wasn’t huge, but it was the first one she’d ever been in. It had high ceilings from which specimens of bone and taxidermied birds were suspended - ground sloth fibula, albatross,  prehistoric whale rib, a brontosaurus’ toe joint, golden eagle - and high windows like a train station. It smelled of coffee and pastrami sandwiches and dusty exhibits. It was beautifully bright, walls plastered with informative plaques and posters and frames of dead insects. There was an entire mammoth’s skull with one-and-a-half tusks still intact on metal stands a wooden platform, surrounded by a brown security rope. There was a huge stuffed sabretoothed cat in a massive glass display case baring its teeth at her, green glass eyes raging. She didn’t get a chance to look at the rest.

 

            “Hey! Rey, is it?”

 

           Luke came out of nowhere, arms full of folders. He was a short, stout man in his fifties, grey hair pulled back in a bun at the back of his head. His beard was still brown in places. He was blue-eyed and tan. A forgotten pen was lodged behind his ear. “Scary, isn’t he?” he asked, tapping the glass. “We call him Baby. I say ‘we’ - I’m the only one here. Kind of a hermit in the archaeology department.”

 

            “It’s nice to meet you,” Rey said determinedly, and shook his hand firmly.

 

            Luke’s office was small and cramped. A Keurig whirred on top of a filing cabinet in the corner. Rey declined offers of tea or coffee, too nervous to drink.

 

           She gave him her resume - so precious, printed in the library and put in a plastic pocket under a lost-lost book’s dust jacket to keep it clean - and sat terrifed as he read it.

 

          “So it says here you have no job experience?” He posed it as a question, brow furrowed.

 

         “Yes sir, that’s right.”

 

         “Anddd …” His eyes traveled the page. “You have a charge here for petty theft, four years ago. And another three years ago.”

 

        “Yes sir.”

 

       He nodded and put the resume down. _That’s it,_ Rey thought, _fuck it. That’s it._

 

        “Listen, kid,” he began.

 

       “It’s fine,” Rey interrupted him. He went silent.

 

       “It’s fine, honestly. I’ll go now. Don’t worry about it.” If she was being passive-aggressive, she wasn’t doing it on purpose, but she was past caring. She’d heard the pitying _listen, kid_ talk too many times before.

 

       She got up. “Hold on a sec,” Luke said.

 

      “No, seriously, it’s fine. Thanks for seeing me, I really appreciate it.”

 

      “I said, hold on. You’re not giving me a chance to get a single word out.”

 

      She was close to tears at this point, finished with it all. “No, I don’t want to hear it,” she insisted, eyes shining. “Seriously, it’s fine. I don’t have the experience, I didn’t go to college, I shoplifted, I get it. Thanks anyway.”

 

      “Do you want this job, kid? You aren’t doing much to convince me.”

 

       Rey stares at him. She inhales and exhales and bites her lip hard.

 

      “This,” she struggles, “this is my … my whole thing. I don’t even know how to describe it. I’ve always been into this. Archaeology and geology and … mammoths. I just didn’t go to college to learn about it.”

 

           Luke looks at her for a long time. He picks up the resume, tears it in two, and dumps it on top of the overflowing wastepaper basket. Rey’s heart stops.

 

          “When could you start?”

 

           _Oh, shit._ “R-right now. Today.”

 

         Luke studies her.

 

               “Alright, Miss Mammoths. Here’s what’s going to happen.”

 

               Luke laid the responsibility on thick as butter - a test to make her buckle - and Rey never did. She was to file, work the till in the gift shop, design exhibits, order artefacts, dust displays, and read a book of Luke’s recommendation every week. She did not break, though in the beginning she would drag herself home to her apartment every evening at five o’clock and beat the fuck out of a pillow, pretending it was Luke’s face. It took a few months to realise that he was teaching her.

 

              The pay is good, but rents rise. She’s still in that shitty apartment in a shitty part of a shitty neighbourhood, except now she can eat more than once a day - snacks included - and doesn’t have to get two buses to the library for internet access anymore.

 

            “Oh, hey,” Luke said, as she made to leave at the end of her twelfth day at work. “Your bonus went in with your paycheck today. Thought I’d let you know.”

 

            Rey went straight from the university to the bank. She checked her balance with trembling hands, and had to input her PIN twice.

 

           She stared at her screen. _$736.30._

 

          There was enough for rent and bills and food - not just sodium noodles and ketchup sandwiches - and enough left over for savings and for … _her._ She withdrew her card and reentered it again, pinching herself as she did.

 

         When it came back the same, Rey rang Luke.

 

         “It says there’s nearly seven-hundred-and-forty in there, Luke - I don’t know if there’s been a mistake, or-”

 

        “Uh, not to my knowledge. That’s your wages and your bonus.”

 

        Rey didn’t know what to say. “But there’s so much.”

 

        “You think so?”

 

        Rey learned later that Luke wasn’t stupid. She came to work clean and as presentable as she could, but he heard her growling stomach and saw the shoddily-stitched hem of her Goodwill work pants. He noticed the lack of laptop or tablet or even computable phone; hers was an indestructible Blockia with hardly any minutes. He noticed the hard weeks, and conveniently lunch was always ordered to the office and bonuses appeared during those weeks. He was a hard driver, but he was not unkind.

 

           On the day of her first paycheck, Rey had never bought - or even seen -  such an enormous amount of groceries in all her life. She went to the nearest dollar supermarket and pushed a red plastic cart around, unable to believe her luck at not having to stick to the packaged pasta aisle. She bought frozen pizzas, oven fries, ice cream bars, bags of frozen fruit and vegetables - broccoli, blueberries, spinach, pineapple, corn, carrots. She bought a seven pound bag of pasta and a six pound bag of rice. She bought a block of American cheese and a bag of grated mozzarella. She went to the butcher’s counter and asked for three minute steaks - _real_ steaks! - and cheap bacon. She bought bags of  own-brand tortilla chips and hot salsa. She bought strawberry milk and green tea and lemon juice in a dimpled plastic lemon. She bought powdered curry sauce and jars of cheap marinara.

 

        She went to the Health and Beauty aisle and bought shampoo that didn’t dry her hair out until it broke, and matching conditioner. She bought pink razors and shaving cream called Wild Berry that smelled like plastic strawberries. She bought a huge eighty-nine cent bottle of lavender bubble bath and a fake, cheap loofah. She bought a tub of Nivea moisturiser, half price for three dollars sixty. She bought a glittering nail polish the colour of watered-down mocha. She pushed her overloaded cart to the stationary aisle and selected a colouring book marketed for adults, and a thirty-six pack of cheap colouring pencils that would, no doubt, break when used. She bought the cheapest cleaning supplies she could find - likely caustic - and six boxes of tampons and four packs of pads. She bought a tiny handheld radio and a tiny alarm clock with a jarring beep. She bought a cheap plastic houseplant and six wilting geraniums for two dollars. She took out ten dollars at the supermarket’s ATM and had the customer service desk change it into quarters for her, for the Laundromat.

 

       When the pimply teenaged cashier finished ringing her up, he asked, “Do you need anyone to help you load up your car?”

 

          Rey was so overjoyed she barely noticed the pain of dragging six full bags home and up to the third floor. She cooked that evening, properly - an enormous pot of pasta and ground beef, oven hot with garlic bread - and after bringing a bowl down to Mara Jade,  ate the entire batch, so full that all she could do was lie on her futon and sleep afterwards. When she awoke, she spent hours cleaning until even the shitty bathroom shone and smelled of chemical spring. She ran the hot water and had a bath, lavender bubbles up to her neck and slopping onto the bathmat. She washed her hair three times. She emerged and moisturised herself from head to toe. She placed her plastic houseplant on a teatowel on the toilet’s cistern and set her dying geraniums on the windowsill for sun.

 

             It felt odd to wake up and have food in the house. It was a strange security. Rey decided never to lose that security.

 

          Within a few months of working at the museum, she could afford a thick Intel laptop and a basic phone plan. A few months after that, she got Wi-Fi. She squirrelled away money into her savings. She went clothes shopping at a real department store on the six-month anniversary of her first paycheck and bought a proper pair of work shoes for seventy dollars. Her head was full of cave lions and direwolves and quartz clusters and igneous rock and Neanderthal vertebrae from Luke’s books.

 

          Luke’s not hard to work with. He’s nice, if a little guarded. He often takes long lunch breaks and leaves Rey in charge. She doesn’t mind that anymore. He isn’t skiving off.

 

         Fridays are slow. The last place most students want to be on a bright Friday is a museum. Rey is at the information desk. A delivery man comes at half past ten with a cardboard box with tape insignia of _Royal Society of Antiquity, Oxford_. Rey signed for it. It wasn’t addressed to Luke personally, but the museum address. She splits it down the middle with a Stanley knife and finds it packed to hell with bubble wrap and packing peanuts. Packing cleared, she finds a wooden box wrapped in clear plastic. Inside are a set of uneven silver coins under spotless muslin stamped with male profiles and Latin text, edged scalloped. Rey recognises them as Roman denarii from her reading, printed with the image of emperors. Luke must have ordered them and forgot to tell her.

 

        Rey is struck by innovation.

 

       She clears a tall display pedestal of its framed African Hissing Cockroach, and with a little rearrangement, sets the Roman coins under the glass instead. She rehomes the cockroach on a spare hook under Insects of Prehistory and types up a brief blurb for the denarii on a printed university card.

 

_Roman denarius, late empire. The denarius was_

_The denarius was the standard Roman silver coin from its introduction in the Second Punic War, circa. 211 B.C.E._

 

      Proud of herself, Rey eats lunch at the information desk. The museum is empty for an entire hour. She goes to ring up an old woman buying a book on the La Brea Tar Pits, and when she comes back there’s a man leaning on the desk.

 

         “Crap, sorry,” she apologises, breaking into a jog as she passes Baby in his case. “Can I help?”

          “Afternoon - is the old man around?” he asks.

 

          Rey returns to her place behind the desk. “Luke?”

 

          The man is enormous. He has to be six-two - perhaps six-three. He has the long face and close, deep eyes of a wolf. His hands are huge and big-knuckled. She imagines the size of his bones like the mammoth’s on the steel claws of the display stand. His hair is blacker than black.

 

    He’s impeccably dressed. It’s casual, but stinks of money. A turtleneck - charcoal cashmere - fits his back and arms as though it is a dark, lush second skin, and a silver chain sits beneath the roll of the neck. His pants are expensive, his shoes are expensive; he even _smells_ expensive, peppery and woody like every spray of whatever he’s wearing costs a grand.

 

            “Yeah, I heard he had a package of denarii for me.”

 

          _Who the fuck are_ **_you_ ** _?_ Rey closes the book and stares him in the face. “I’m sorry?”

 

        His tone is slow and sarcastic, like she’s a child. He has a big nose and lips fuller than hers. “Don’t be. Luke has a set of Roman denarii, late empire. I’m here to buy them from him. Is he here?”

 

        Rey bristles. “No, he’s not. He’s on lunch. You can’t _buy_ the denarii.”

 

       “Why not?”

 

       “I - they’re _artefacts._ If you want to buy something, go to the gift shop. We just got those coins this morning.”

 

        “Where are they?” he asks tersely.

 

       Rey glances rapidly at the tall display case only briefly, but he follows her gaze and spots them. “Ah. Much obliged.” He stalks towards them.

 

     Rey rushes out from behind the desk. “Hey, _no_! You can’t touch those!”

 

       “Don’t get your panties in a twist, for Christ’s sake.” He bends over the case. “Oh, fuck’s sake - where’s the key to this thing, doll?”

 

     She tries a calm approach. “Sir, you can’t handle the artefacts. Sir - I really don’t want to have to call security. I don’t want to waste my time doing that.”

 

          “Yeah, me too.” He fiddles with the case, not paying her any attention. “So where’s the key for this?”

 

              Rey’s hand inches towards the phone in her pocket. “I’m not giving it to you.”

 

             “Very loyal of you, but I have an arrangement with the old man.” He digs in his pocket and waves a thick stack of cash at her. “I’ll pay. Get me the key.”

 

            Her eyes bulge at the sight of the money. _Could I?_ **_No!_ ** . “Touch that case and campus security’ll tase the fuck out of you.  Hey, don’t _touch_ it!”

 

          “Look, _sweetheart_ ,” the wolf says exasperatedly. “I said, me and the old man have an arrangement. Now go get the fucking key before I have to get it myself.”

 

        There’s no signal on her phone - fucking sunken levels - and she races for the office phone. _Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck._ She jabs the campus security hotline, heart hammering, and when it picks up she races outside again. He’s still fucking with the lock. When he sees her on the phone he rolls his eyes.

 

        “Sweet Jesus, calm down.”

 

      “ _W.U.B. Campus Security, what’s your emergency?”_

 

Rey blurts, “Hi - I work at W.U.B. Museum of Antiquity and there’s a, uh - white male trying to steal an exhibit from the display cases - he’s being belligerent -”

 

     The man raises his head and gives her a look at the word _belligerent._

 

     “ _Are you alone on the premises, ma’am?”_

 

    “Uh, yes, my colleague is on lunch, I’m alone with him, he’s belligerent and possibly dangerous.”

 

    “ _Okay, ma’am, we’ve dispatched a member of security to help you - do not repeat this to the individual incase he tries to run. Can you see any members of the public or students that you may be able to alert for help?”_

 

   Rey can - there are students passing by the stone arches, professors in sweatervests, but she can’t. She can’t cause a scene. She can’t give Luke a reason to get rid of her.

 

      “No, there’s no-one else here, it’s just me and him.”

 

_“Ma’am, can you secure yourself in a supply room or a back office if you feel that the individual is making you feel unsafe?”_

 

“He’s going to steal the artefacts from the-”

 

    “ _Your personal safety is of more importance to us right now, ma’am._ ”

 

      Rey puts the phone to her neck and hisses, “ _Fuck you_ ,” at the man bent over the display case. “Security is coming and they’re going to tase the fuck out of you, _fuck you_!”

 

      “Fuck _you,”_ he grizzles, distinctly unbothered that security is incoming. “All you had to do was get the fucking key.”

 

       Rey drops her mobile from her other hand. It skids across the floor. She runs to get it, bends, rises. When she turns, the man is gone.

 

     The display case is empty. In the wooden box’s place is the green wad of cash.

 

      

                                      ------------------

            

 

                The security guard comes at the same time as Luke, shuffling back from his lunch break, jingling his car keys. Rey rushes at him, heart hammering in terror, face red in fear.

 

               “Shit, Rey, what’s the matter with you?”

 

    “Some fucking -- _guy_ came in and took the denarii!” she splutters, overcome with rage and panic. _I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m going to be fired, I’m so fucked._ “He just opened the case and took them, every single one! I called security - did you see him?” she asks the guard.

 

               “We can take a look, ma’am, and call law enforcement if that’s how things pan out-”

 

              “John, it’s alright,” Luke interrupts. “No, truly, I’ll handle this. Yes, I’m sure, we’ll get a hold of you if anything happens. Thanks, bud.” He herds the man out.

 

    She expects Luke to go blotchy with rage and cast her out, but he comes back to the desk and stares at her. His eyes close. He pinches the bridge of his nose, just above his spectacles, and says tersely, “What _guy_?”

 

    “I don’t -” Rey is deeply disconcerted at the absence of anger and rebuffal. “I don’t know, just some man. Fucking _asshole,_ too, but - Luke! He took the new coins! He left _this_.” She shows him the stack of cash and he takes it.

 

    Luke inhales slowly, and exhales slowly. He takes his hand from his face and goes to his desk. He adjusts the chair height from high to low to high again.

 

    “Forget about the coins. Just go back to what you were doing.”

 

    “But-!”

 

    “Drop it, Rey.”

     

                 She stews all afternoon, typing so roughly that the angry _clack-clack-clack_ of the keys echoes all around the exhibits. Visitors come and go - Friday afternoons are rarely busy - and Luke rings up a cuddly mammoth and a mini Venus of Willendorf in the gift shop. The sun streams in through the high, Grand Central windows, painting the exhibits lemon-yellow. Luke leaves at three or so, but doesn’t bring his coat or briefcase. Rey stays where she is. Someone comes in looking for the Greek vase, and she shows them. She keeps an eye out for the enormous wolf-faced man, but he doesn’t come back. The afternoon is slow, dust hanging in the buttery air.

 

    Luke comes to her desk when he’s back, bearing small talk and a box of doughnuts like a slave under a pharaoh’s litter. Rey is still sour. She takes a fat chocolate doughnut, covered in nuts and fit to pop with caramel filling, and trains her eyes on the computer screen.

 

                “The guy that came - he, uh - he’s my nephew.”

 

               Mouth full of caramel, Rey raises her head and stares.

 

               “He’s my sister’s kid. He’s a businessman, got plenty of that.” Luke rubs his fingers and thumb together. “Kind of a collector on the side, mostly Roman. We have an arrangement.”

 

              “Your sister?”

 

             “My twin, yeah. Yeah. Look, it’s complicated, kid. Sicilian families always are. He’s, uh …” Luke seems to struggle with the words. “He’s high up. Let’s say that. He’s high up, he has money, and we should be glad he only wants the coins instead of something bigger. At least he pays.”

 

    Rey wants to smush her sticky fingers into his eyes. “That’s not the point!”

 

                 “No, that _is_ the point. I know how you feel about the whole buying-and-selling thing, okay? I do. But one set of coins every few months won’t kill either of us, and it definitely doesn’t hurt to have this kind of money in the petty cash. Besides, like you said, we’re prehistoric. We don’t need them.”

 

              Rey is outraged. “Do you order them in _just_ so you can sell them on?”

 

            “ _No_ \- Rey,” Luke says frustratedly. “I’m not arguing with you about this. Okay? I’m not. The coins are gone, we have … _this.”_ He flaps the wad of notes. “We’ll source something better. Maybe we’ll look at getting something over from Europe. Siberia? We could even look at La Brea if we’re lucky.”

 

    Rey is sullen for the rest of the afternoon. She doesn’t give a fuck about cave bear skulls or mammoth tusks frozen on the permafrost or sabretooth bones, steeped black by ancient tar. She wants the denarii. Luke keeps a rightful distance and lets her stew.

 

    She’ll kill the fucker if he comes back, nephew bedamned.

  
  


   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Stronzo Irlandese_ \- Irish bastard  
>  _Meticcio brutto_ \- half-breed  
>  _Consigliere, caporegime, and soldati_ \- 3 ranks in the typical Sicilian crime family or organisation. The consigliere is adviser, counselor, and mediator for the Don. They counsel the Don and resolve disputes within the organisation or between their organisation and another. (See: Threepio, Benito Kenobi, Mon Mothma)  
> The caporegime are essentially 'captains' of smaller groups of soldati, and can also serve as bodyguards to the Don. (See: Hux, Bazine)  
> The soldati are the lowest ranking members of the organisation. Footsoldiers, as it were. They do the shitty stick work. (Han is a 'footsoldier' in the Irish Mafia, but rises up due to Leia's influence.)  
>  _Nonno/nonna_ \- grandfather/grandmother  
>  _Paesano_ \- peasant, common people  
>  _Va bene/bene_ \- fine/okay/good/very well  
>  _Stronzo fotutto_ \- fucking idiot.
> 
> Enjoy! xxx


	3. Blue Jean Baby Queen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~~~
> 
> SS&D PLAYLIST: 
> 
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5tD4D7BWShTkB70uqITB9r?si=NQBenUr9QYy8EAsypYGOxg
> 
> CHAPTER THEME:
> 
> ROCK ON | DAVID ESSEX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes i know there has been a hiatus yes i am deeply sorry yes this chapter is 16k eXACTLY
> 
> None of the institutions in this fic are real places, by the way - the museum, the uni etc - I'm just lazy.
> 
> CONTENT WARNING: graphic violence, sex, mentions of drug use.

                Benito Organa is worth many hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

Four-hundred- and-twelve million, to be quite exact, not including the tied worth to his mother’s inheritance. Mama often tells him that, even when Padmé and Anacino were new and rich in comparison to impoverished Brooklyn, when their money was made on massive protection rackets, they were beggars compared to the wealth the new generation has amassed.

 

When Benito became a man, he founded First Order Secure Solutions - a private military contracting company, providing security to whoever could afford their services, with some exceptions. Leia was at his back as the company grew, and owns considerable shares. 

 

His mother's only condition is this;  _ no war.  _ Under no circumstances is Benito to provide services to military regimes, to warlords, to org anisations whose business is embroiled in government occupation, weapon research, annexation, invasion. Thus, First Order Secure Solutions - also known under the moniker F.O. International - instead lends its fifteen-thousand-strong employee base to secure disease research centres, international banks, private individual security and, of Benito’s own volition, protection of dig sites and artefact recovery operations across the world. This, he thinks, is rather impressive for a bastard child of the Mob and the Mafia.

 

                 Those on the receiving end of his ill favour surely think so, too.

 

He makes the drive up to Boston himself - the second in two weeks - leaving early so he’ll miss rush hour traffic, and rush hour at the museum - not, he thinks, that there really is one. The museum is, at best, two-thousand square feet, inclusive of its gift shop, with another three thousand in wasted green out behind its high old windows. It has some mildly interesting exhibits - the half-tusked mammoth, the ugly stuffed tiger - but is a passing amusement, somewhere professors drag their reluctant students before bussing them off to somewhere worth being.

 

It’s somewhere worth being now, because s he was gorgeous.

 

                In the museum, the air is thick. Coffee, dust, floor polish, more coffee, and sandwiches from the university's Humanities café; pastrami, chicken, lettuce, vegan shit. Nothing good, nothing worth anyone's money or anyone's mouth. She was tall, though nowhere near as tall as him, and her eyes were large and wide like a doe. She h ad brown hair up in a rushed ponytail, two errant curls before her ears, a pen behind one of them.  _ Bella,  _ in a sweater the colour of moss and blue jeans and sturdy boots.  She snapped and raged and told him  _ fuck you  _ with the phone in her ear. He fucked off before she could lose it, but he w as sold.

 

                 She has been on his mind for a week and a half. Rarely do people speak to him that way, and he likes the rage, the brattiness. He likes her commitment. He likes her tits.

 

_Rey,_ it read on her bronze nametag. _Gorgeous._ Benito parks in the staff parking spaces outside and internally _dares_ the draconian university cops to put a ticket on it. The campus is busy, and it's a cold morning; students tramp through piles of fallen leaves, huddled in their almost-winter coats. Ben goes up the wheelchair ramp by the museum's entrance and walks in as if he owns the place.

 

                 It's busier than ever he has seen it; seven whole people are looking at the exhibits. A girl with blonde pigtails is talking to Luke and scribbling in a notebook. Rey is sitting, resplendent, at the information desk with coffee and a doughnut.

 

                 "No," she says, when she sees him. "No, no way." The aureus - golden Roman coins - are in a small case close to the desk, and the packaging they came in is stuffed into the wastepaper bin.

 

_ Spiteful girl. Beautiful. _

 

                "Afternoon to you, too."

                She has her beautiful hair half-up in a topknot and gloss on her lips. 

 

“C an I  _ fucking  _ help you?” Rey asks, tone as sugary and as polite as she can make it. “Or are you here to steal  _ more _ of these one-of-kind exhibits?”

 

“Yeah, I’m here for those.” He points at the aureus. “Sticking them in a display case isn’t going to make them untouchable, doll.”

 

“You can wait until Luke is done. I won’t have any part of this.”

 

“Oh, sweet Jesus Christ, don’t start this shit again.”

 

“I’m not saying you can’t have them, I’m saying I won’t be giving them to you.”

 

“ _ Now _ who’s being belligerent?”

 

                "Fuck you. These are artefacts, not ornaments. Those  _ denarii  _ were ancient, and you  _ took  _ them."

 

“I paid. More than they were worth.”

 

“I don’t care. They belong in a museum, not in your fucking boudoir.”

 

He studies her. If pride had a face, it’d be glowing red where Rey has slapped it.

 

“Fuck off. Actually, you know what - you’re barred. Go on, fuck off. You’re legally barred. Go steal artefacts from someone else.”

 

                 And thus, at twenty-nine, Benito Organa experiences his first ever legal barring, to which he will pay no attention. 

 

                He gets the aureus, but comes back three days later after another email.  _ Luke must be sick of the sight of me.  _ The driving is worth it to see her, but he feels a little stalkerish, like the horror stories on womens' blogs about persistent men turning up at their workplaces so they can't say no. 

 

_ Fix it today,  _ he tells himself.  _ Or leave her alone, and let it go.  _

 

                When he lopes into the post-war wood polish dredgery of the prehistoric museum, Rey is nowhere to be seen. Luke is there at the curved information desk, nose-deep in a fat book, but lurches up when he sees him. There is a box of donuts on the desk, three of which - peanut butter cup, strawberry shortcake, and caramel, Ben assumes - are labelled with a pink sticky note bearing the word  **REY** in black marker.

 

              "Right here," Luke says, plastic cheerful, and thrusts a stamped box at him. They do not do small talk. Ben isn't sure that Luke even knows  _ how. _

 

               "I'm here to see Rey," Ben says delicately. "Thanks for the coins." 

 

                Luke stares at him as he puts the package in his hand. Ben looks patiently back at him. His uncle looks younger than his years.

 

              "Rey," Luke repeats. "Rey? Why?"

 

              "None of your business,  _ zio,  _ I'm afraid."

 

              Luke's chest puffs out in its idiotic archaeology club t-shirt, its open plaid overshirt. "It's my goddamn business where the safety of my employees is concerned," he says, strained. "Now, you get a hell of a lot of leeway, Benito, but you-"

              " _ Sicurezza _ ?" Ben exclaims, almost grinning, and their dispute descends into Sicilian. "You think I'd lay hands on a woman unless she asked me to? You dirty old man,  _ zio. _ "

 

            "You watch your mouth," Luke orders, going red, his Sicilian stuttered from years of unuse. "I'll call your mother and watch what happens then."

 

             "Call her and I will, quite literally, smash all these sad old exhibits to shit. I just want to talk to Rey. Go get her, good man."

 

              Luke stands there seething for what feels like a long time. Students amble by in the hallway beyond the stone pillars and the café's coffee machine hisses like some great cat.

 

"She's in the gift shop," he says finally. "Five minutes."

 

"Ten, and I won't make you eat your framed bugs."

 

Luke says nothing.

 

 " _ Ciao, zio, _ " Benito says idly, and trails into the gift shop. 

 

When she sees him, she scowls, and very purposely ignores him, writing on a thick legal pad behind the register.

 

"Oh, I get it. Look, I'm not trying to stalk you. I don't have an incel blog I'm gonna go and write about you on. I just want to talk."

 

She says, "I'm here to work, not talk," and does not stop writing.

 

"I know. I just feel like we got off on the wrong foot last time."

 

Her scribbling stops. "You mean when you stole a package of ancient coins from a  _ museum _ ?"

 

"Technically, I did pay."

 

She lifts her eyes and glares. Ben holds his hands up. "Okay, okay," he concedes. "You weren't to know."

 

“You got your coins. Now fuck off.”

 

Ben finds himself deeply interested in her precious snub nose, her freckled cheeks. “I’m going to the Museum of Antiquity this weekend, in New York.”

 

“I don’t care.”

 

“Come with me,” he says.

 

Rey raises her head. 

 

               “I don’t think so. Didn’t I bar you?”

 

                  “From the museum, not the gift shop. You didn’t specify.”

 

                  “Well, I’m specifying now.” She points to the door with the tip of the pen. 

 

                  Ben considers that a moment. He goes towards the shelf of stuffed animals, selects a plush bison, and puts it on the counter. “I’ll take this,” he says cordially. Rey stares coldly.

 

                “Why don’t you just take it and throw the money on the shelf like you always do?”

 

He leans on the counter. “I will buy everything in this room. Even these shitty pens.” He flicks one of the cheap flamingo pens so it wobbles on its spring. “It’s pocket change to me. Come with me to New York.”

 

“I’m sorry-” She puts her book down and does not sound sorry in the slightest. “-but what the fuck do you think this is, West Side Story? You’re  _ barred _ , Mister Organa.”

 

“You think I’m joking? I’ll buy everything in this shop. Every last thing. Starting with these.” He lays a handful of the flamingo pens on the counter. “Oh, and paper bags, please.”

 

Rey does not look away from his face for a long time.  _ Bellissim _ a, he thinks, her face so full of determined rage. She is determined to be angry with him. He’ll let her.

 

“Let’s do this properly, shall we?” From within his breast pocket he produces a small black moleskine and a silver pen. “We’ll write it up. Start with those … plush things, how much are they?”

 

“Are you serious?"

 

                 Benito simply holds her gaze until she gives in. Rey could slap him, he thinks, at this distance, and he’d let her. He’d let her claw him with those badly-lacquered mocha nails. 

 

She grits her teeth and spits, “Twenty-one-ninety-nine,  _ dickhe _ ad.”

 

“Shit, for a stuffed animal? No wonder museum gift shops get no business.”

 

“Fuck off,” she bites. 

“.... twenty-one-ninety-nine, and there’s …” He peers over to the shelves and scribbles. “Thirty of them. That’s …. Six-hundred-and-fifty-nine dollars, seventy cents.”

 

             He buys half the shop, most of it the expensive plush toys. Rey refuses to bag a single item, and sits there staring at him, ringing up purchases with ever-widening eyes. She puts a stop to it halfway through - “we  _ need  _ stock.” 

 

“Fucking Jesus. You’re such a prick,” she mutters, ripping the mile-long receipt out of the machine. “Who the fuck blows nearly two-and-a-half grand on fucking teddy bears?”

 

Fiercely, a plush mammoth in his hand, he exclaims, “Someone that wants to take you out.”

 

“You can fuck off. This is ridiculous. You better take all this shit with you.”

 

"Nah, I think I’ll leave it. Two grand is chummy change. You should have a donation thing for the children’s hospital, though,” he tells. “Education, whatever.” 

 

“Because the very thing sick children need are stuffed smilodons. You’re an asshole.” She throws the receipt across the counter at him. It flutters to his feet, almost graceful, an inky ribbon, and for a moment Ben goes hot with bruised pride and thinks he could fuck it back at her.

 

_ No, no - breathe. You’d be fucked off, too, right? Breathe. _

 

__ “Then shelve it. Keep the two grand, I won’t tell if you don’t.”

 

She slams the till shut and stares at him. “If you think,” she says lowly, “if you are going to  _ p _ ay me to come to New York with you, then you are  _ very  _ wrong.”

 

“Your words, not mine.”

 

“Ugh.”

Behind the counter, on top of a curved shelf full of files and books and pamphlets, there is a Dolcé Gusto in cherry red.  _ Looks like Luke never lost his taste for coffee that wants to be Sicilian really bad _ . Rey presents him her back and turns it on.

 

_ Bella ragazza  _ \- and she is; taller than most, but petite, with a small chest and a backside that, Ben is sure, feels as much like a peach as it looks. Rey rummages in a box of pods, puts one in the machine, sets a university mug under it and doesn’t look at him as the machine hisses.

 

“Hey. Rey, come on.”

 

“Come on  _ wh _ at?” she exclaims, and Ben stifles the urge to tell her  _ on my face _ . 

 

                 Instead, he beseeches her, “Just listen. Okay? Listen.”

 

The coffee machine sputters, and Rey takes her mug away and still does not look at him. 

 

“Listen. I know my Mama funds the shit out of this place. I want to as well, because, honestly, it kind of looks like a heap of shit.”

 

Rey shoots him a glare so foul and full of hate and pride that he almost regrets saying it. “It’s a university museum,” she hisses, “not the  _ fucking  _ Smithsonian.”

 

“Yes, but it could be better. It could, you know it could. I could make it expand, make it really bring in money. You could really fucking  _ educ _ ate people that way, instead of just showing them that God-awful stuffed tiger - I mean, Jesus, I know it was made in the fifties or whatever, but  _ fuck. _ ”

 

She sips at her coffee, eyes hard. 

 

“I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’m not asking you to sell your ass for a few fossils.”

 

“You fucking pig,” Rey snaps, and for a moment he thinks she might cast her coffee at him. 

 

“I’m serious. You want a date, you got one. But this isn’t one. No strings attached, right? Let me just take you out. I'm not gonna demand a blowjob for taking you to a fuckin' museum."

 

"You really know how to make a girl feel safe," she says, voice dripping with sarcasm, and immediately he feels guilty.

 

“Oh, you’ll be safe. You have my  _ word  _ that you’ll be safe.”

 

“You know, it might come as a shock to rich assholes like you, but New York isn’t a lawless feral wasteland. What do you _ do,  _ anyway?"

 

"I'm a businessman. Private security, mostly.” 

 

...a _ nd the rest - but you don’t need to know that. _

 

She gives him a dirty look. “So you’re a mercenary.”

 

“No, and the company isn’t either.” When she keeps her eyes trained on him, judgemental, he says, “We all have to make our living.”

 

“Maybe. Gotta pay for those stolen coins somehow, right?” Her expression goes from tight to mocking, and Benito could kiss it off her face.  _ Bellissima. Perfetta. Sfarzos _ a. “Jesus. Why are you so obsessed with them?”

 

               He shrugs. "Why are you and Luca so obsessed with old tiger teeth? We like what we like."

 

               "Right. Though 'old tiger teeth' and the other things we study are like, you know, the building blocks of evolution. Not bigots' wet dreams."

 

              "Oh, you think I'm a bigot?" he chuckles.

 

              "Most men obsessed with  _ the glory of Rome _ tend to be. Like World War Two nuts. Glory of the West and all that."

 

              "Most men  _ obsessed _ with the glory of Rome and World War Two are five-foot-four and planning mass murder with their mall ninja katanas. I'm not obsessed. I'm a collector." He adjusts his collar. "I have the means, so why not?"

 

              "Lucky for some. You  _ should  _ help Luke out with the exhibits, then, if you have  _ means,  _ Mister Organa."

 

              "I owe him nothing. But I'll help  _ you. _ Come to the MOA, tell me what this place is missing, and I'll make it happen." When she watches him, silent and unmoving, he asks, "What?"

 

            "I'm just trying to figure out what the catch is."

 

            "There isn't one."

 

            "There is  _ always  _ a catch," she tells him.

 

            "Not here. You told me no, right?"

 

              The dust dances between them on a long plane of sunlight, warm and desperately hanging on to the last vestiges of autumn. Rey asks, tentatively, "How far is the drive to Boston?"

 

             "About four hours. Three hours forty-five on a quiet day."

 

            "And it wouldn't be a  _ date,"  _ she warns him.

 

            "Not unless you say so." He grins lazily.

 

            Primly, she says, "I don't."

 

            "Noted. So - tomorrow?"

 

            "I'm working until four."

 

            "I'll tell Luke to get cover, then," Ben affirms, leaning on the counter with the flat of his forearms.

 

           "There  _ is  _ no cover. It's just me."

 

           "Just you," he echoes, smiling, and to his delight, she allows him a half-smile, too; not a forced  _ now-leave-me-alone _ expression, but a genuine stifled smile. "How does Saturday sound?"

 

           "Saturday's fine."

 

           He unlocks his phone, pulls up the  _ New Contact _ page, and gives it to her. "Stick your number in there and I'll call you."

 

            She does, and gives him her phone to do the same. It is a blocky old Samsung, touch-screen, but it feels sluggish and heavy compared to what he’s used to. She only has three contacts in her phone; Luke, university police - he smirks at that - and someone called Mara-Jade. He wonders who Rey  _ has _ , where she comes from.

 

           Luke collars him on his way out. "What did you say to her?"

 

          "I asked her to come to the MOA with me, and she said yes."

 

          “You don’t let anything happen to her, you hear me?” Luke snaps, quietly. “That girl has had a  _ shitty  _ life. A goddamn shitty life. Shittier than anything you  _ or  _ I will ever understand. So you don’t fuck her around, Benito."

 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

 

Luke lowers his voice even further. “She had nothing, you spoilt idiot. She used to go days without food because she didn’t have the fucking money. She nearly fainted in the break room once. You think she’s skinny now, you should have seen her a year ago.”

 

               "Is  _ that  _ why you had such a stick up your ass earlier?"

 

               "I had a stick up my ass because I don't want you to start making a habit of - of  _ being around  _ and dragging her into any - any  _ business. _ "

               Benito's pride is bruised a little. "Yeah, 'cause I'd put her in harm's way like that. Where does she live?”

 

“In the fucking projects. I drove her home once and she made me stop at the top of this street, and - just shit. No place for anyone to live. Especially a girl on her own."

 

“Right.” Ben’s plan was germinating, but now it has bloomed. “I’ll see you Saturday.  _ Ciao. _ ”

  
  
  
  


\--------------

  
  
  


                  “Hey, Rey?”

 

                  “Yeah?”

 

                  Rey is back at the information desk, filing copies both digital and hard. Her mind is full of Benito Organa and his long face and his dark brows and his bear paws and his plush lips and his  _ fucking money.  _

 

__ _ You really said yes,  _ something jeers her _. You said yes because he was smiling. Fucking idiot. You can back out, but you won’t.  _ The time on the clock reads 4:22pm. Rey will go to New York, with Benito Organa, and she will go to the Museum of Antiquity. Once. Only once.

 

Luke is hauling one of the taxidermied arthropods across the floor. "Where do you think I should put this? I moved it so I could put the direwolf in its case, but now it's like a big scaly obstruction."

 

                Rey has never liked the look of the plated orange arthropods, with their rippling chitin and endless pairs of legs. "In the basement," she says in distaste. "You could bring the molars out of storage. Say they're 'replicas'. Wouldn't be a complete lie."

 

               "Yeah, you're right." He sets the ugly creature on the desk and sighs. "Fuckers. Oh, I meant to ask - you and Ben, are you -”

 

Her skin flushes warm. “No,” she blurts.. 

                 Luke stares at her.

 

“-going to New York this weekend?” he finishes.

 

“Oh.” Blood floods red under her skin, a hot epilogue to her first embarrassment. “Uh, yeah. Saturday."

 

                 "Saturday, right. Well, just be careful."

 

“Why?"  _ Shit.  _ Half a hundred reasons flit through her brain. "Is he - is he dangerous?”

 

Luke looks into the arthropods beady glass eyes - all four of them - and sighs. “Just be careful. He’s high up, right? He has a lot of money.”

 

“What are you saying?”

 

“Fucking hell, I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. Just be careful, okay? If anything …  _ weird  _ happens, you tell me and Ben.”

 

“What do you mean,  _ weird? _ ”

 

“Jesus, I don’t know. Weird cars, people following you. No, don’t start panicking,” he exclaims, when Rey starts in her seat. “It’s nothing you need to panic about.  _ If _ you see any of that shit, you tell him and you tell me, right away, alright?”

 

“ _ Oh.  _ I mean - I figured that shit’d happen with … high-profile businessmen, I guess. I thought you meant, like,  _ him. _ Like he was a creep or something.”

 

“Christ, no. No, not that. Not a creep, just  piss-arrogant. But you knew that already. No, it'd just be business rivals, shit like that.”

 

“Yeah, I get you.” She watches him heft the arthropod into his arms again. “He said he wants to fund this place.”

 

“He said. And if he does, great. He’s worth more than his mother. But big businesses bring big rivals and big competition.”

 

“Did he tell you about his company?”

 

“Private military, right?”

 

Luke looks at her around the arthopod’s ugly head. “Right. Some people don’t like the military, whether they’re government-driven in Iraq or private and protecting a fucking dig site in Scotland. His mother’s a silent benefactor. He won’t be. And I don’t want the university giving me shit for being militarily-funded. I also don't want it turning into a pissing contest between  _ other  _ PMCs to see who can fund the most, because they won't be quiet."

 

_ Fuck.  _ “I didn’t even think of that.” Rey leans on the desk and groans. “I could - I don’t know. I could try and get him to expand the place. Make it so they won’t even care.”

 

“Jesus, I don’t even know yet, kid. Just - go to New York, and be careful, alright?”

  
  


  -----------------

  
  


                 On Friday evening, after the bus home, she receives a text from the contact labelled Benito Organa. She is lying in bed with a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa when her phone buzzes.

 

_ Text me your address so I know where to come get you tomorrow. B. _

 

__              Rey stares at it. She can't - even when Luke drives home, she insists on getting out at the end of the street, ashamed of the ugly block. 

 

             She replies,  _ ill meet you at the museum the roads to my place can b tricky _

 

_             I'd rather not look at Luke first thing in the morning. How about the end of your street? _

 

_             thats fine,  _ she tells him, and texts him the street address.

 

_ Okay,  _ he texts.  _ I'll see you then. x _

 

__   Rey curls her lip at the  _ x. _

 

__

\-----------

 

               She's ambling to the end of the street on Saturday morning, cold as balls, and feeling exposed, when a sleek, dark matte car growls down the road, headlights diamond-blue. Benito gets out of it.

 

               It's an imposing black car, no shine to its body at all, like its spray swallows the light. Rey doesn't know cars, but she'd liken it to an Audi, or one of those Skoda cars from the annoying ads.

 

                The suspension is good and high and the windows are black, too. Rey wonders if it's illegal to have them  _ all _ tinted so dark - she's  _ sure  _ she read that somewhere - but it's none of  _ her  _ business.

 

            He's leaning on the bonnet when he sees her. "Morning," he says pleasantly, and opens the passenger door for her. He's composed and attractive in a snug brown sweater - cashmere, Rey bets - that puts his gold chain on show, and a dark denim sherpa. He has tucked black curls behind an overlarge ear. "You ready to go?"

 

           "Yes. Thank you."

 

          She  _ is  _ ready; raincoat tucked in her backpack with her powerbank, cash, water bottle, and a sandwich bag of puppy chow, hastily put together the night before after browsing Road Trip Snack Ideas on Pinterest. She thinks she looks museum-ready in a black polar-neck.

 

           The car is spotlessly clean and upholstered in creamy brown leather, its radio screen a tasteful, touch-interactive interface framed in polished dark wood effect. The dashboard is blue LED. Rey slides into the seat. 

 

             "What kind of car is this?"

 

             "Maserati  _ Quattroporte _ ," he answers, and raps on the inner side of the door as he gets. Rey notices a thick gold ring on the middle finger of his left hand. "Armoured." 

 

             "Pretty," she murmurs, feeling the smooth upholstery. It smells like pine. She wonders why he would need it armoured.

 

             "Did you eat? We could-"

 

_ No!  _ "Oh, no thank you. I brought snacks - I mean. It's puppy chow. I won't eat that in this car."

 

           The car purrs as he turns the key in the ignition. "You can eat whatever you want," he says, smiling. "That's what full valets are for." 

 

           They drive in silence and odd small talk until they are out of the city. Rey decides that, while he is a complete prick, he was kind enough to do this for her. She looks at the grey sludge of the inner city blur into neat white-and-green suburb, and finally into the autumn of rural New England. 

 

            “You’re Italian, right?” she asks stupidly, as if it isn’t clear by now.

 

            “Sicilian,” he corrects her, changing gears. He seems sensitive about the distinction. Rey can’t take her eyes off the ring on his middle finger. “Just outside of Palermo.” It’s some kind of cat - no, a bear - embossed in the gold band; _real_ gold, no doubt, three years' rent.

            A grey sedan swerves stupidly in front of them when they merge onto the highway, and Ben  _ tuts  _ and mutters, “ _ Stronzo.”  _ He overtakes a  Jeep in the next lane.  “What about you, puppy chow, where are your folks from?”

 

           Rey chews and swallows. “I haven’t got a clue.”

 

          “You don’t know?”

 

          “I didn’t really know my parents."

 

          "Oh." He seems somber, then - apologetic. "I'm sorry."

 

          "Oh, no, they aren't  _ dead.  _ I'm - I was in care homes as a kid."

 

           He looks as if he will apologise again, but thinks better of it and furrows his brow. Rey goes a little red. "A case file said something about my dad being Polish or Ukrainian, or Belarusian, something like that, but that’s about it."

 

        “Ah.” He flexes thick fingers on the steering wheel. “I figured  _ Niima  _ was Slavic, or something like that.”

 

        "Yeah."

 

        "How'd you end up working for Luke?" he asks, then clarifies, " _ with  _ Luke."

 

        "Oh, uh - he put out a job ad, and I saw it."

 

        "Did you go to UOB?"

 

        She blushes. "No, I - I didn't go to college."

 

        "Neither did I," he admits. "It isn't everything."

 

        Rey is surprised by that. "You're right."

 

        "Plus, working at that place, you probably learn more than most college students anyhow, right?"

 

         "Probably. At least I don't pay to learn."

 

         Benito laughs, and his teeth are cloud-white. "Exactly. They pay  _ you _ , and so they should."

           The conversation is confined to work, Rey too proud to ask him much about himself and Benito careful not to push her. Rey takes her bottle out of the bag and sips carefully at it. She catches him watching her in the mirror.

 

           "I won't spill it," she says pointedly.

 

           "I know." He smiles again. He is relaxed in his driver's seat, one great hand resting on the clutch. It reminds Rey of the stone paw of Michelangelo's David; huge, thick, white as marble. The ring is strikingly gold against his skin.

 

            "Your ring, is that a bear?"

 

            He lifts his hand to look, as if surprised to see a ring there. "It is, yeah." To Rey's surprise, he leans his forearm on the wheel, slips it off, and hands it to her. "It's real old. It was my grandfather's, I think."

 

             The ring is heavy, and warm from the heat of his hand. Rey dares slip it onto her own finger. It's diligently polished, the embossed bear roaring up at her in clean fury. "It's beautiful. How much - is this rude? - how much is it worth?"

 

           "That thing? It's plain gold, so not a whole lot. Maybe three grand?"

 

_ Not a whole lot.  _ Rey, before her job, would have stolen it from him. She hands it back. "It's nice."

 

            "And this-" He hooks the chain out from under his shirt. "This is twenty-four karat, as well. Worth more because it weighs more." He unfastens the clasp with one hand and lets the chain drop into her hand. 

 

_ All this gold.  _ Rey stares at the chain. It's warm from his thick neck, and meticulous cleaned. It sparkles. The links are small and fine, but it too is a heavy piece of jewellery. 

 

             "Try it on, if you want."

 

             "Me? Oh, I - I don't know if I'm able to do up those fiddly clasps." She  _ does  _ want to try it on, but isn't sure. She holds the cool metal around her neck.

 

              With one hand, Benito unceremoniously reaches behind her head and fastens it deftly. Rey goes soft at the heat of his hand on the back of her neck.

 

                He rests his paw on her nape. "Better?"

 

_ Jesus, he's warm.  _ Rey breathes in the peppery smell of him.

 

              "Better."

 

              "Suits you. You should have one."

 

              "Oh, God, not where I live. Someone would kill me for it."

 

              Ben looks scandalised. Rey goes on, "I asked my landlord to put one of those metal door-barriers in, once, and he essentially told me not to keep valuables in the apartment."

 

               "Fucker," Ben says. "Who is he?"

 

               "Some Polish guy. Unkar Plutt. He raises the rent every month and then just slams it down, over and over. He's a dick."

 

                They are interrupted by a blue station wagon driving stupidly on the interstate as they approach the suburbs of New York City, but Rey sees Ben's jaw set.

 

               The Museum of Antiquity is vast; a massive tribute to a Greek pantheon, it looms on the corner of one of the busiest streets in New York City. Rey has never been here before, and it is like Boston's bigger, bawdier sister; lights, cars, unsleeping, unending. The sky is grey, and it spits rain.

 

              Ben parks behind it - drives right in through the main entrance to the staff carpark - and brings Rey back out front so she can walk in the main entrance. Rey checks her phones;  _ 12:34pm. _

 

              It is, obviously, sparkling clean; glass cases polished and floor Zamboni'd every night, displays dusted daily, exhibits changed regularly. The main foyer boasts a chandelier fifteen feet across, the skeleton of a raptor on a raised platform, an enormous gift shop.

 

                It is oddly empty.

 

              Ben leans on the reception desk and murmurs to the woman at the desk, and then says to Rey, "You coming?"

              "Wait - our passes-"

 

              " _ I'm  _ your pass," he assures her, and ushers her into the exhibit she had enthused about:  _ Beasts of the Prehistoric World. _

 

There is, to Rey's delight, a vast reconstructed mammoth exhibit, trunk pointed skyward, tusks thrust out before it in delicately painted resin. "They were alive when the pyramids were being built," Rey tells him. "Isn't that amazing?"

 

           "What killed them off in the end?"

 

          "God, lots of things. Overhunting, climate, habitat loss. They're trying to clone them somewhere in Siberia, too.  _ Pleistocene  _ Park."

 

          "Better than Jurassic Park?" he chuckles.

 

          She smiles and says, "Maybe."

 

          They go next to a pair of skeletal cave lions; one male, one female, according to the bronze plaque on the railing protecting the display. The skeletons are on a high platform covered in hyper-realistic snow and rock. "I  _ love  _ cave lions," Rey breathes. "They found cave lion  _ cubs  _ in Siberia a few years ago, perfectly preserved and frozen. They want to clone them, too."

 

          "Did cave lions live in caves?" he asks. 

 

          "No, it's - well…" And off she goes, rambling. She tells him, as they walk from display to display, about cave lions. She tells him about the smilodon, and its variations between North America and Eurasia. She tells him about the woolly mammoth and the land bridge between America and Siberia.

 

             He listens.

 

            Her lecture is interrupted by a shrill, nasal man's voice. "Excuse me!" it drones, and Rey turns to see a small, dark-haired man squeaking in patent shoes across the hard wood floor. 

 

           "This exhibit isn't open to the public yet!" the man exclaims, brandishing a clipboard. "How did you get in here?"

 

Benito turns sharply and gives the man such a look that he steps back a little, clutching his clipboard like a shield. "You need to  _ leave _ ," the man orders them. Rey reads  _ Dr B. Fett  _ on his nametag. "You're trespassing."

 

              "Who do you think you're talking to?" Ben asks him.

 

              "Who do _ I-  _ I beg your pardon, sir, I am the  _ directing curator  _ of this museum, and you two are  _ trespassing."  _ His hand hovers threateningly over an obnoxious little walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. "I'm calling security."

 

"How nice for you. This lady here is from the SFU," he tells him, and clamps a heavy paw on Rey's shoulder. "You ought to have a little respect for people who don't speak English as shittily as you do."

 

"The SFU?"

 

"Siberian Federal University. Miss Niimkova is a top researcher for the biggest Holocene rejuvenation project on the planet, and I don't think her overheads would be too pleased to discover that _ you  _ were impeding on her research.”

 

The director draws himself up and asks, “Who are  _ you _ ?”

 

"Benito Organa," Ben tells him, baring his teeth, and Rey sees the colour drain from the man's face.  _ He knows him. _ "First Order Secure Solutions. I was contracted  _ personally _ by the SFU's sponsors to make Miss Niimkova's research run as smoothly and as safely as possible, and right now,  _ sir,  _ you are making that very difficult.”

 

 "I-" The man's bravado has all but fled. "Sir, I- I didn't know, I thought the booking was for a group, for later-"

 

                "You thought wrong. Now hop it."

 

                He does, leather shoes squeaking furiously across the polished floor until he disappears behind the mammoth display. Rey gives Benito an abrupt poke.

 

                 "Did you know him?"

 

                "He knew of  _ me.  _ I spoke to his receptionist."

 

"Why did you give him that Siberia bullshit? He knew who you were."

 

"It's fun to watch fuckers like him try to pull rank and be important. The Russians scare  _ everyone. _ Siberians even more so." 

 

                Rey looks at him as he examines a seventy-pound ammonite. "You rented this place out, didn't you?"

 

               Ben doesn't quite meet her eye, smiling. 

 

               Rey inhales sharply. "Oh my  _ God.  _ Why?"

 

               "Well," he says, running his hand over the ammonite's plaque. "It's your first time here. I didn't want it to be busy."

 

               "Well," Rey echoes, a little embarrassed. "Thank you."

 

               Awestruck, she drags him about the displays; ground sloth, an animatronic tetrapod, a reconstruction of a family of Neanderthals, a pack of direwolf skeletons arranged like playing dogs. The last one they come to are the brown, tar-leached bones of a Californian sabre toothed tiger, a lankier beast than its European cousin. Behind it an enormous projected display shows a 3D animation of the beast drowning in the tar pits from whence it came.

 

               ' _ SWEETIE'.  _

 

_                8-10 YEAR OLD MALE SMILODON (SMILODON FATALIS)  _

 

_                APPROX. 8 MILLION YEARS OLD. _

 

_                DISCOVERED: LA BREA TAR PITS, CA. _

  
  


__  "He's beautiful," she says aloud.

“You like it?”

 

“Yeah.” She stares up at the looming skeleton. The empty brown skull stares back, its jaw wired open to maximum gape. The bones are bare, but she can still imagine its raging bright eyes, the wet of its nose, the yellow of its oversized, protruding canines against the scruff of its brown chin. She can see the long thick lines of muscle in its short limbs, and the stiff, dark dorsal mane.

 

Ben says thoughtfully, “I could get you one of those, you know."

 

"For the museum?"

 

"I'll get you one for your house, too." He has the Pleistocene confidence of the smilodon above them. “I could make a few calls.”

 

"Hardly," Rey says, almost in wonder. "And I'd have nowhere to put it. My place is tiny."

 

                 Ben chuckles.

 

                 They spend hours there. Rey drags him to the Natural History section, marvelling at the dinosaur remains on their massive platforms; the Mesoamerican wing with its reconstruction of Incan sun sacrifice; the American History hall with its Confederate animatronic and displayed weapons. When Rey is done, Benito's phone rings. "You go ahead," he tells her, giving her a gentle nudges towards the gift shop. "I'll meet you at the railings."

 

               In the vast gift shop, Rey notes their product displays, the aerial hangings of birds both taxidermy and replica. She treats herself to a rare splurge; a palm-sized resin replica of the sabre toothed tiger's skull and a matching anatomy poster, a book called  _ Giants of the Holocene,  _ and several bars of novelty chocolate, one of which she begins to nibble at as she passes under the looming terror-bird over the exit. 

 

            Benito is leaning on the railing, like he said he would be, cheeks and nose a little red in the cold.

 

            "You want some?" she asks him, mouth full, and proffers the bitten bar. "It's really good."

 

         Ben smiles. "Too early for me to eat chocolate, I think."

 

        "It's never too early for chocolate."

 

            He laughs, then, and he is beautiful.

 

           The drive home is easier. Rey barely notices the time passing as they drive through the cool November evening. She is, despite herself, disappointed as they reach the city and drive deep. 

 

           "I have a, uh - a book I could lend you," she says, when he parks. The apartment block is hideously dark and grey after her day out. "On cave lions."

 

              It is dark all around them, the only light the LED of the Maserati's dashboard. His dark eyes sparkle with it.  "Oh?"

 

“I can get it for you. You wanna wait here?”

 

He looks out the window, the dirty beams of the streetlight shading his face a yellowy grey.

 

                “I’ll come in.”

 

She sees him looking at the dirt on the steps, the filth of the stairwell. Her apartment is clean. Rey thinks it’s pretty; prettier than it was before, when she had nothing. She Raided the roaches out long ago, and papered the walls - a clearance-sale lemon print for underneath the kitchen cabinets, yellow on white, and an abrupt change into pleasant, faded canary for the rest - left the windowsill groaning with the weight of glass jars full of geraniums and marguerites. She leaves her books everywhere, her half-finished craft projects, leaves geodes on the breakfast bar, leaves dishes in the sink for a little too long. Her bookcase is painted white and her beloved sofa is frayed but intact. The building is rust-and-rain-stained, the stairway rank and ugly, but her home is not. 

 

It feels ugly with Ben in it.

 

He doesn’t  _ make  _ it ugly. It feels ugly because she knows he is seeing it through eyes that have never seen worktops that aren’t granite or fridges without food. The latter isn’t strictly the case, not anymore, but Rey is sensitive about it even so.

 

Rey unlocks the door. Benito is so tall he must stoop to enter. She covers her breakfast dishes in the sink with a chopping board and asks, “Do you want coffee?” Her hand hovers over the unopened tub of instant coffee by the kettle, a year old and never used. 

 

               Ben looks at it, cheap and shitty and, Rey assumes, the furthest thing from anything he knows, and politely declines. 

 

              "I'll get the book. You can sit, if you like."

 

              He, like a patient lion, sits on a tiny kitchen chair, and waits. Rey disappears into her room. She fumbles on her bookshelf for  _ Cats in the Cave: The Story of Panthera Spelaea,  _ and when she finds it, she goes back out.

                  "Found it," she says. "It's not huge, you'll finish it in a week."

 

                  He takes it. "Thank you."

 

                 "So, uh-" She doesn't know what to do with her hands. "Thanks for today, you did me a favour. It was really fun."

 

                 "You did me the favour," he says solemnly, standing. His voice is softer. "You let me take you."

                  "You're right. And the museum will be all the better for it. Oh, shit, your chain." Rey reaches under her collar and fumbles with it, reaching behind her head. "One sec, hold on-"

 

                 Benito Organa takes gentle hold of her wrists in both enormous hands.

 

                 Rey goes warm.

 

                 "Keep it," he says softly.

 

                 "Keep it," she repeats, trembly. "I can't. It's yours."

 

                "And now it's yours."

 

                  They stare at one another for a time. Rey can't look away from his plush mouth.

 

                  Quite why he takes her face in his hands and kisses her, she does not know. She stands, kissing an arrogant rich man that steals coins and rents museums and wears gold, in her shitty tipbof a kitchen.

 

_ Fuckfuckfuckfuck- _

 

                 His lips are  _ sumptuously _ plush -  _ far  _ more than any man's ought to be - and when she squeaks against them, he pulls back.

 

                "I'm sorry," he says, husky.

 

                "No, I - you startled me, that's all."

 

                "Oh."

 

                "You can -" She swallows hard. "You can do it again." Benito's pupils are blown so wide that the brown of his pupil is almost full eclipsed.

 

              He does. He takes her hands and places them around his neck and lets her, tentatively, explore his mouth with her tongue. He tastes, bizarrely, of aniseed, and something else that is just  _ man.  _ It makes Rey cling to him, and in response he grunts, and lifts her clean off the ground.

 

_ Is this for the museum - or me?  _

 

              She doesn't care.

 

             "Tell me what you want," he groans, kissing her jaw, her neck, nipping. He's so tall she has to lie flat against against him so she doesn't knock her head on the lamp. 

 

             "You," Rey gasps.

 

            He carries her into her room and kicks the door closed. He sets her down and in one swift motion he pulls her sweater over her head. He strips her of her jeans, her sock, her boots. He sits on the bed and pulls her to stand in front of him.

 

              The clock reads  _ 9:53pm. _

 

             Rey feels strange in her plain bra and underwear, white with a pink bow. Ben unhooks the former and stares at her chest.

 

            " _ Dio mio,"  _ is all he says.

 

            Awkwardly, she responds, "They're not much, but they're mine."

 

               Kissing them both, he breathes, " _ Sono perfetti. Sono bella. _ " 

 

                His hands go to the band of her knickers, and she goes still. 

 

_                  Didn't shave. Shitshitshit. Shit! _

 

__   She turns away from him and pulls them off, lets them fall. "Shall I turn off the light?"

 

“Let me see,  _ bella mia. _ ” Ben takes hold of her hips and twists them to face him. 

“ _ Don’t! _ I didn't  _ shave _ -"

 

                He catches her, and she goes utterly crimson. Benito puts his face to her stomach and inhales, a beast sound.

 

                 "Good," he growls, "you're not a child, you're a woman." 

 

                Rey hesitates, and then pushes her hips against his face, gently, daring to touch his mop of dark hair.

 

               His eyes open, and they are darker.

 

               “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you on your hands and knees right now," he demands, hot breath ghosting deliciously over her bare skin.

 

Rey flushes puce from her hairline to her breastbone. 

 

“I don’t have a good reason.”

He studies her.

 

“I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to,” he says, and lifts his hands so they hover an inch off her hips.

 

“No, I do,” she tells him. The paws relax on her skin. “i have the implant. I just - it’s been a while since I - did anything.” 

 

“How long?”

 

Rey last had sex when she was sixteen, at a house party, and swore she would never do it again, because it was shit, and she could get herself off better than anyone else could. “Six years.”

 

“Six years?  _ Dolcezz _ a …”

 

“Well, it was shitty."

                 Benito's nostrils flare. "Did he hurt you?"

 

                "No. It was just shit. I didn't even have - I didn't even come."

 

               " _ Va bene, _ " Benito declares." _ I'll  _ make you come."

 

               He undresses. She has never seen a body like this in her life; great, wide thing - skin ten times as pale as she - and a chest and belly like a bull. His shoulders are as wide as her shelves, his back so broad she could sleep on it. When she unzips his jeans she giggles at his branded briefs, a little nervous of the bulge straining against the cotton.

 

               "You like that?" he asks, as she dares to touch it - it's a warm ridge under the fabric. 

 

              "Yeah. Can I-"

 

              "It's all yours," he purrs.

 

               He cups her cheek as she carefully pulls the band of the briefs down, and his erection springs free. He's thick, and uncircumcised, cock swollen and dark. Experimentally, Rey pushes the delicate foreskin back from the glans.

 

              He fucks her in her bed, with the lights on. He licks at her cunt until she comes -  _ twice,  _ puts her on the bed and parts her thighs and devours her, and then takes her from behind until she comes again. 

                Ben groans, " _ Dolcezza mia, _ " as he comes, and shunts his hips flush against her behind, a noisy beast. " _ Dio,  _ you're fucking gorgeous. Jesus Christ. Look at you, fuck."

 

              She feels wrung out, tender, afterwards, but good. Benito stays. He noses at her, nuzzles, kisses every bit of her, says soft things to her in Sicilian, strokes the dark curls between her legs so she giggles.

 

             They drift off together. The lights are still on. Outside, cars beep.

 

               At almost one in the morning, Rey feels him shifting, yawning.

 

              "Stay," she insists.

 

              "I gotta piss, sweetheart."

 

              She lets him go, watches the ripple of his back and thighs as he walks. He leaves the bathroom door open and she is, to her surprise, delighted by it.

 

                He stands still in her tiny bathroom, naked and enormous, and the white of his skin is so stark. “ _ Jesus _ , this toilet is low to the ground, ain’t it?”

               Rey rolls over in the bed and giggles. Benito jibes, "Don't be looking at me when I pee, you freak."

 

              "I'll look all I like, it's my bathroom."

 

               He comes back to her and they sleep again. He rouses her at seven, the thump of his boots on the floor as he laces them up. Rey opens her eyes to a thick white back, bent over the edge of the bed.

 

               "Are you going?" she yawns.

 

              "I have to,  _ cara. _ " He pulls on the sweater, the denim jacket. "I want to stay more than anything, but I have to go." He leans over to embrace her.

 

               Suddenly petulant, she gripes, "Stay."

              "I gotta go, babydoll," he murmurs, kissing at her lips. She groans in sleepy protest and tries to hold him. "I know, sweetheart, I know."

             "Stay," she insists.

             "I can't,  _ bella _ ," he groans. "But I'll come back. Soon. Okay? And you can call me whenever you want."

 

             "Okay."

 

             "Give me a kiss before I go, sweetheart."

 

             She does, and he goes. Rey goes to work on Monday after a weekend of furious masturbation, mind full of his cock and his tongue.

 

                She does not take off his chain.

 

                 On her lunchbreak, Luke asks carefully, “Where’d he take you?”

 

                 “The MOA, then home. It was great."

 

                “The MOA,” Luke concluded, sucking the air in through his teeth. “Jesus, I haven’t been there in, what, twenty years? Do they still have that great big mammoth?"

 

            "Yeah, they do. It was amazing."

 

              “That place is  _ proper  _ prehistoric. You won’t get more authentic than that.”

 

            "I noticed. It really was great. I have so many ideas."

            "Yeah." He eyes her. "Are you seeing him again?"

 

             Rey doesn't look at him. "Maybe."

 

             "Anything untoward go down on the trip?"

 

             "No!" she exclaims, scarlet.

 

            "That's not what I - okay. Fine. Just  _ be careful. _ "

 

            She spends the week thinking about Benito Organa and his cock, his tongue, his long face, his thick fingers, his great bull's body. He calls her often; on her way home from work, especially, and then while she's eating or in bed. He comes on strong - Mediterranean passion, Rey suspects - and she likes it. She likes  _ him. _

 

          Saturday morning - a week after he fucked her silly in her own bed - is slow. Rey wakes early and eats, reads. She cleans her toilet and considers baking, but ambles back to her bed instead and dozes.

            Her doorbell rings at half ten. It's misting rain. Rey sits up.  _ Who the fuck- _

 

            She pads to the kitchen and grabs the phone off the wall.

           "Hello?"

 

           “ _ I got a delivery for a Rey Niima _ ?”

 

           Rey starts, confused. She hasn't ordered a thing. _ " _ Oh - uh, one sec.”

 

             The delivery man is looking warily at a mucky dog on the sidewalk when Rey comes down in her slippers, a large cardboard box between his knees. “You gotta sign for these,” he says, when she opens the door, and produces a tablet. “There’s a couple more in the truck.”

 

                “A couple  _ more _ ?”

 

               “Yep, all in the same shipment.”

 

              “Where are they from?”

 

              “I just deliver ‘em. Sorry.”

 

               The cold air and the spitty rain bites at her bare arms. Rey signs the tablet and balances all three boxes all the way up the stairs. She can hear Mara Jade singing to herself. She backs into her apartment, panting, and locks the door with one hand while she strains to support the boxes with the other.

 

                She carries them into her room and sets them down by her bed. A boxcutter - one of her many weapons - is produced from the bedside locker. The boxes are marked  **PRIORITY MAIL.** She splits the brown tape securing the box down the middle.

 

               There is a card, good and heavy in a cream envelope with  _ Rey  _ printed in a curly copperplate on the back. There is a wax seal securing the flap - pale golden wax stamped with a bear identical to Ben's ring - and when she breaks it she is met with an exquisitely gilded, folded note.

 

               Her heart beats hard. A note - from whom? She turns it over and something flutters onto her lap. Rey lifts it and almost drops it, as if it will burn her.

_ A one-hundred dollar note.  _ Rey inhales sharply. Benjamin Franklin gazes at her. It is wrapped in a stapled strip of paper, and in horror and pleasure both she realises that it is accompanied by ten more. "What the fuck," she breathes. "What the fuck. What. What?"

 

              She turns the note over. In the same neat hand she reads:

 

_ Rey, _

 

_              Enjoy, bellissima. _

 

_              Benito. _

 

__ "Fuck  _ me _ ," she says aloud, but clutches the note close and turns on what lay under the card.

 

                The first box is full of sweets. There is a great shiny case of Ferrero Rocher in its crinkled gold foil. Rey pops open the case and eats one immediately, stressed.  There are two stacks of thick Ritter Sports under the box of chocolates, each one a veritable brick of silky German chocolate, tied with a length of satin ribbon.

 

               Rey has always passed these treats by in supermarkets, their five dollar price tag too rich in her eyes for three-and-a-half ounces of chocolate when that same five dollars could buy bread and milk and eggs for an entire week. Even after her retreat from the poverty line, she is deeply frugal, and satisfies her sweet tooth with two dollar tubs of ice cream and seventy-five cent bags of chocolate peanuts. 

 

                She examines the varieties of the first stack, edging the ribbon to the side; coconut, marzipan, espresso, hazelnut, strawberry creme, cocoa mousse, praline, peppermint, cornflakes. The remainder of the box’s contents consist of Italian-brand candy bars in brightly coloured wrappers and bags of sweets in cellophane twists that crinkle cheerfully when touched.

 

              The second box opens to reveal odd curiosities; a carefully packed box with a split geode, emerald green; a strange bronze terrarium encasing a tiny stack of coins - Roman, no doubt - each separated by silver wire so that the air fills the space like a tiny, tiered golden cake; a stack of leather-bound books with gilded titles; a great heavy mandible on its own steely stand with a plaque that reads:

 

_ PANTHERA SPELAEA (MALE) _

 

_              CIRCA. 11,286 B.C.E. _

 

_              SAHKA REPUBLIC (YAKUTIA) _

 

__ It's the jaw of a cave lion. Rey runs her finger in terrified awe along the sharp and ancient molars.  _ How did he get it? How much did he pay?  _ **_Why_ ** _ did he get it? _

 

               Worries aside, Rey looks at it all, heart swelling in delight and terror both; these beautiful things, costly and handpicked - all for her! 

 

                She sets the jaw on her beside locker and nibbles on the coconut Ritter as she starts on the third box, chocolatey thumb slipping on the slider of the boxcutter. She splits the brown tape securing the box and pulls the cardboard wings aside.

 

                She lifts the box, blinks, stares. "What…"  She takes an indiscriminate black box from within its parent, opens it, and gasps.

 

             “Jesus  _ fucking _ Christ."

 

                Sex toys.

              These are expensive _ , _ too, she realises; metal and glass in velvet boxes, soft silicone with triple-digit prices, she imagines, if these had packaging she could Google the names of. It’s all discreet and ergonomic, nothing gaudy or tacky, everything rechargeable, no need for batteries. There are little pouches to hold everything in; dark, silky satin with ribbon drawstrings.

 

                Rey is going pink looking at it all. She has never owned anything like this; not even an electric toothbrush. She gingerly opens the various boxes and stares in awe and almost-shame at the contents; a matte black vibrator the size and shape of a bullet with such a tremendous motor that Rey drops it in shock when it powers on; a small glass rose clearly designed for anal use in the most vibrant wine-red Rey has ever seen; a flat black box tied with a pale pink ribbon that when opened contains a set of lingerie - bralette, briefs, garter belt, stocking - in delicate, translucent cream lace, with the most exquisite needlework in silky thread in shades of rose and mauve and peach. She touches this and the rest, awe-struck. Her bed is covered in chocolate and geodes and vibrators. Her breath sticks in her throat.

 

She seizes her phone and texts him, shakily:  _ what the fuck _

 

__ __ He replies -  _ ping!  _ \- when Rey is holding a stainless steel phallus up to the light.

 

_ What _ ?

 

__ _ I got ur packages _

 

__ __ _ Do you like them? _

 

__ She doesn’t get a chance to reply. Ben calls her, contact flashing on the screen, and when she holds the phone to her ear, he is laughing.

 

“Stop!” she exclaims.

 

“ _ You’re too cute, you know. You like them _ ?”

 

                "This is too much, really, it must have cost a  _ bomb -  _ and the cave lion jaw - _ how- _ "

 

                " _ Sweetheart, they were given as gifts. To make you happy. Nothing costs a bomb. Not to me _ ." 

 

“Yes, but - I don’t really know what to do with them. No, I mean -  _ I do,  _ but - I don’t even know.”

 

She hears the slight creak of an office chair on the other end. “ _ I’ll come down and show you then.” _

__

“Aren’t you working?”

 

Benito laughs. “ _ Fuck work _ ."

 

The words  _ fuck work  _ sit in her head for four hours.  _ He's going to come all the way up to Boston and we are going to have sex - again!  _ Rey nearly kills herself trying to race to the bathroom.  She rushes into the shower and shaves her legs. She stares in the mirror and considers shaving the rest. 

 

_ No, fuck it. He likes it. _

 

She remembers, errantly, the scene from Mrs Doubtfire where the bus driver sees Robin Williams’ hairy knee and tells him he likes that  _ Mediterranean look  _ on women.  _ Natural, healthy - the way God made ‘em. _

 

__ Stupid, but she’ll stick to it. Benito will get her shaved  _ legs _ \- nothing else.

 

              She changes her sheets and makes her bed. She has three sets of sheets - one set a plain striped grey-and-white brushed cotton, soft and overwarm for the winter, found unopened in a thrift store, intact in its buttoned plastic pocket; a gingham set with a stock-printed brown stag pattern, hunting lodge chic; a reversible set of creamy white jersey cotton printed with pink peaches, stolen from a department store and hidden, unpackaged, beneath the dollar t-shirts in her shopping bag. She stuffs the grey set into her laundry bag and puts the cream sheets on her bed, l!turning the quilt over so the childish peach print is hidden.

 

             Rey rummages through the mint plastic boxes on the bathroom window ledge and produces a lavender sheet mask, bought months ago and kept in case of a special occasion. This, she thinks, as she washes her face and covers it in slick, lavendery tissue, most definitely qualifies as the former.

 

            Her hair is dry and her skin smooth and stinking of Provence when the doorbell rings, the radio set to a soft-toned local channel that dedicates itself to long-dead female torch singers. 

 

           She has dressed herself in blue shorts and, upon deciding that opening the door in the lingerie he sent is too much, a long sleeved white cotton t-shirt, the sleeve of which she has already gotten tea on. She panics, wondering if she should have ordered in groceries or dinner or-

She presses the buzzer and stands by the door, heart hammering and stomach knotting. His long legs must bring him up the stairs quickly; he knocks, and Rey stands still in terror a moment before she opens the door.

 

" _ Buongiorno _ ," he says pleasantly, so big he takes up most of the doorframe. He wears a black knitted jumper that clings to his big back and, shockingly, dark jeans that cling to his big thighs. His thick, lace-up boots are darkest brown - no doubt genuine leather, product of an expensive Italian outdoor pursuits brand. Over his thick shoulder is the dark sherpa.

 

               "Hi," she says, desperate to sound calm. "You look nice. Do you - d'you wanna come in?"

 

              "I can't exactly fuck you in the hall, can I?"  Ben bends to kiss her. A curl of black hair falls before his eye as he does. " _ Ciao, dolcezza.  _ You look beautiful."

 

                "Just shorts." She reddens. He notices his chain on her chest, and lifts her clean off the ground. "Ben!"

 

                 He quiets her with kisses. "Look at you," he grunts, "in my gold. Beautiful. I'll cover you in gold,  _ bella. _ " Benito hefts her towards her bedroom.

 

                 He lets her undress him. To Rey it is like a present; pull of beautiful cashmere and cotton for the thick gladiatorial body beneath, as white as snow, scattered with beauty marks. She could map the stars on his chest, she thinks, and his eyes shine with desire like twin Orions. 

 

                Ben's big paws are deft when he pulls off her scant clothes. He sits on the bed, naked - his cock is thick, hard, dark - and has her stand between his thighs. 

 

              “Come here to me. Look at you.” He turns her, like he did in their first tryst, and makes a very male sound, nose to her hipbone. He strokes the dark curls between her legs. 

 

             "Jesus, you're something else."

 

               She wriggles in delight. "Am I?"

 

              "You know you are," he tells her, as he brings her down to lie on the bed. She playfully resists, and when he tickles her to bring about her surrender, she pulls the print-down quilt over herself in squealing defence. 

 

              "Oh,  _ peaches _ ? Turn it over, it's cute."

 

              "Don't, it's silly."

 

              "No, it reminds me of this  _ piccola pesca  _ right here." He squeezes her backside softly. "I'll get one, too; in fact I'll plaster my house in peaches so I don't forget it."

 

               He uses the black bullet on her, expertly circling her clit until she almost cries, and then pulls her into his lap.

 

              Rey says,  "I don't - the rose, the plug thing- can we do that another time?"

 

              " _ Amore,"  _ he exclaims. "I'll destroy it if you don't want it. I should have asked."

 

             "No, I do - just not today. Not yet."

 

            "Not yet," he affirms. "You tell me when you want to then,  _ dolcezza,  _ and we will." 

 

             He insists upon giving her another, trapping her against him. Rey can feel her heartbeat in her clit. "Come for me, babydoll - that's it, sweetheart, good girl." He nibbles her neck, two fingers buried deep, thumb stroking insistently over her swollen clit. "

             Rey grinds her backside against his erection. "Please."

 

             "You want me to fuck you,  _ bella mia? _ " he asks, lifting her so she can sit down on his cock.

 

             "Yes," she gasps. "Yes, fuck me, fuck me, Benito, please-" 

 

_ BANGBANGBANGBANG. _

 

             Rey shoots up.

 

             “Oh,  _ fuck _ .” Someone hammers on the door furiously, fist closed. 

 

             “Who the fuck is that?"

 

_              BANGBANGBANGBANG.  _

 

_              The rent! _

            “ _ Plutt,”  _ she exclaims. “I forgot to pay the rent, it’s sitting in my fucking hall drawer,  _ shit.  _ Move, Ben, let me up.” 

 

              She pushes him off and yanks on her shorts, a hoodie. "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Fuck!" She nearly falls over herself racing out

 

                No sooner than she has flung open the door, Plutt barks, "Niima! You owe." A cigarette hangs out of his mouth, and he has an obnoxiously thick gold chain around his obnoxiously fat neck.

 

               "Here, it's here," she gripes, and he snatches it from her to count it. He fiddles every note with his fat fingers and huffs suspiciously.

 

             "You short, Niima," he drawls.

 

_       " _ I'm not - I'm not! You said five-hundred-and-twenty!"

 

              Plutt shrugs. "Is six-hundred-and-twenty now. Rents rise." 

 

              "Are you joking?"

 

              "Do I look like I'm joking?" he explodes, sending smoke into her face.

__  Rey could cry. Before she responds to him, Ben bustles past her, fully dressed and exclaims, "Oh! You must be Mister Plutt! I've heard wonderful things." In his hand, he has one of Rey's museum clipboards, snatched from the kitchen table.

 

               "Who the fuck are you?" Plutt grizzles.

 

__            “Benito Organa,” Ben introduces himself, and offers his  hand. Plutt glares at it until Ben lets it fall. “I’m a property investor. I was just taking a look at Miss Niima’s premises.”

 

              “ _ My  _ premises,” Plutt snaps, shoving the bills into his coat pocket.

 

             “Oh, are you the landlord? I  _ am  _ sorry, sir, Miss Niima didn’t specify.” Ben holds his hands out, jovial, unthreatening. “Can we take a walk? I prefer informal meetings.”

 

_ What the  fuck are you doing?  _ Rey wants to scream, but says nothing. Plutt scoffs.

 

            "Not going anywhere without the rent."

             "Sir, in due course - this is an excellent system you maintain in this building. I'd like to discuss investing it in. I think you've really made something of yourself here."

  
  


_ Benito _

 

 

             A fat, greasy man with a heavy Eastern European accent barks at Rey in the doorway, brandishing her rent money in fingers indistinguishable from raw pork sausage.

 

_ Plutt. _

 

           Unkar Dawid Plutt is a forty-six-year-old Polish immigrant landlord who makes his money exploiting the poor and the desperate. This Ben knows by way of Bazine, and the eyes he has across Europe. After Rey divulged the details of her hellish tenancy, Ben asked Bazine to do two things; find out everything there is to know about Plutt, and find his family.

 

            Unkar Plutt owns ten apartments - three in the building Rey lives in - and tramps to each one on the first of the month to collect his rent. There is no fixed rate. Bazine relayed to Ben that the man traps tenants with suspiciously low deposits, and then hikes them up, drops them, hikes them up again. It keeps apartments lived in and his pockets full. 

 

             Every month Plutt sends, Bazine told him, a thousand dollars home to his eighty-two-year-old mother, Beata, who resides in the grey residential blocs in the bleak suburbs of Gdánsk, Poland.

 

          She, like most Poles, is a devout Catholic, and leaves her apartment at ten o'clock every morning to be at Mass by eleven. Government aid for the elderly is poor, Bazine told him, and so Beata Plutt uses the money to pay her rent, to heat her tiny apartment, to buy poppy-seed paste for her  _ makoviéc _ and tins of sprats to feed to the mangy cats in the dank alleys around the bloc. On occasion, she will treat herself to lunch in the city. The rest she squirrels away, like old people like to do.

 

             Plutt is a greedy dog, but he loves his mother to death, the way most bastards do.

 

           It was through Bazine that Ben discovered the rates of rent that Rey is forced to pay. Five hundred one month, seven hundred the next, two hundred the one after that. Plutt himself makes almost ten thousand a month.

 

_ She had nothing,  _ Luke said.  _ She couldn't eat. She fainted.  _ His woman, his beautiful sweet girl, was  _ hungry-  _

 

          Ben reminds himself not to kill Plutt.

 

          He yanks on his pants - trapping his erection in his waistband - his sweater, his boots. He buckles his belt and storms out to the hall, pulling one of Rey’s work clipboards from the table.

 

           He persuades the man to walk with him under the guise of a property investor - though what property investor approaches the tenant instead of the landlord, Ben does not know. Perhaps it is a testament to the man's enormous stupidity.

 

           Plutt barks at Rey, "You owe me hundred dollars, Niima," and goes with Ben. As they turn the corner of the stairs, Ben winks at her.

 

          "I'm with First Order Realtors," Ben explains, tapping at the clipboard with the pen attached to its clip. "We're looking into working with property owners in areas such as this - investing in landlord schemes."

 

         They exit the main door - Plutt lets the door swing back at Ben's face - and Ben asks him, "So, Mister Plutt, how many properties do you own at present?"

 

             "Ten."

 

            "That's an impressive number for one landlord. Could we go down this street here?" Ben asks, gesturing at the alley beside the apartment block. "There's a few old store fronts I'd like to take a look at. So what's your rental rate? And do you have the same for every property?"

 

            "Ten properties," Plutt brags. "Same method in every one. I make five and a half thousand dollars in a  _ bad  _ month." He has a fake, gold-plated chain around his neck that Ben can just see under the stained fake silk of his shirt and the cracked fake leather of his jacket. He touches his own gold chain in disgust, an opulent ridge under his shirt.

 

             They pass a row of the back of closed bodegas and mini marts, their aluminium shutters ancient and rusted. It smells here, trash strewn all across the path, black bags propped up against the walls to accentuate the graffiti. 

 

            "All of them in Boston?" 

 

            " _ Tak,  _ on the same block. Keeps it central."

 

           "Do you think you'd be open to taking on more properties with higher rents?"

 

            Plutt's eyes shine at the thought of more money. "Doesn't matter how many, as long as they pay."

 

             Ben pretends to note this on the clipboard. He marks a column of bulletpoints and scribbles next to one very time Plutt speaks.

 

  * _FAT_
  * _FUCKING_
  * _UGLY_
  * _MOTHERFUCKER_



 

__  "And what kind of maintenance do you do on the property?" Ben inquires.

 

           "Ha!" Plutt barks. "I don't live in them. Not my responsibility."

 

 

  * __DIRTY BASTARD DOG FUCKER__



 

 

__ "Riiight," Ben says genially, scribbling. "Keeps the cost down." He puts the clipboard under his arm and clenches his fist. They sidestep a puddle. A rat shoots across their path and disappears under a ruined door on the other side of the alley.

 

            "Exactly. Fucking scum should be happy they have a roof over their heads. Especially that little bitch  _ Niima _ . Smarmy fucking look on her face when she hands over the rent, looks me up and down like she's better than me. I bet you she whores out of that apartment. I ought to drop in unexpected one night and catch her in the act."

 

             That makes Ben go hot with rage. His beautiful, sweet girl, with nothing; expected to fund this fat fuck's undiagnosed heart condition and fake gold. As Plutt details his plans for an unannounced inspection, Ben drops the clipboard. Plutt looks at him askance.

 

           "Hey, your paper!"

 

           "I don't think I'll be needing that."

 

           Plutt seems to realise that he has been backed into a dead end. Nothing lies beyond but trash cans and dead rats. He looks nervously at Ben, unsettled by his sudden shift in tone.

 

          "Yeah, well. I got to get back. More rent to collect." He makes, too swiftly, to step past Ben. 

 

         Ben grabs the greasy lapels of his jacket and slams him into the aluminium shutters behind him so fiercely he hears a vertebra pop. Plutt roars, but in this backwater of constant sirens and yelling and corner boys, no one will pay much attention. 

 

           "You listen to me, fat boy," Benito snarls, and shoves his forearm sharply into the blubber of Plutt's neck. "You keep your fat fuckin' mouth  _ shut  _ or I'll rip out your fuckin' throat."

 

           "Fuck you," Plutt chokes.

 

           Ben knees him hard in the groin and he doubles over. Ben delivers four swift punches to his fat jowl, his shoulder, his neck, his eye, and he goes face first into a puddle that Ben is sure is ninety percent dogshit. He kicks him hard in the ribs, stands hard on his hand until Plutt screams, and then drags him up by his neck to smash him against the shutters again.

 

           "Who the fuck are you?" Plutt shrieks, flailing. Ben headbutts him hard when he tries to feebly strike him back and splits the side of his nose.

 

           "I'm about to be a real big pain in your fat ass, you ugly bastard."

 

          "Get the fuck off me. I have people - they'll kill you - and Niima!"

 

           The threat to Rey infuriates him.  “Hey, motherfucker-” Ben gives him another shove, painful strike between his fat back and the metal. “Don’t fuck me around,  _ stronzo,  _ I know where you live. I know where your shrivelled old fuckin’  _ mother  _ lives, you flabby fuck, so don’t fuck me around. You don’t raise the rent again, you hear me?”

 

           Plutt spits in his face. Ben brings a fist up into his nose so hard it crunches. Blood cascades down the man’s front. He roars as his nose is broken, and Ben shakes him hard. He puts his face right close to Plutt's ear.

 

           “Number seventeen, Warcynsz Plaza, shitty little block outside of Gdansk, right?” Ben asks, teeth bared like a dog. “She wears a red headscarf to church every Sunday and feeds the alley cats,  _ right? _ "

            Plutt's struggling weakens. He stares at Ben in horror, bloody.

 

          "I got  _ eyes,  _ you hunk of shit," Ben hisses.

          “You go near my mother and I’ll kill you,” Plutt breathes, jowls trembling. 

 

         “Fucker, I'll break her fucking neck. You think I won't? I'll snap her like a fucking twig."

 

          Plutt bellows and makes to grab at him with his ugly hands. Ben smashes him down, yanks him up again, throws him down once more. He learned to wrestle lawfully with the Sicilians and box like a wild thing with the Irish. Nothing goes astray here. He strikes the Pole in the face with both fists, kicks him hard in the ribs, the back, the head. When he is done, Plutt is blubbering like a baby, limp dead weight when Ben drags him, grunting, against the shutters once more. Oh, he could shoot him; he could blow his brains out and never be caught - and even if he was, no one could touch him. He could kill the fucker stone dead and sweep Rey away from this biting bastard of a city, take her back across the Atlantic to Palermo, and she'd never lift a finger again in her life.

 

_ And she'd never forgive you,  _ something says in the back of his mind.  _ She's proud like that. _

 

           Ben grunts, "Are you finished,  _ bastardo? _ 'Cause I could make your afternoon a  _ whole  _ lot shittier  _ very  _ fucking quickly."

 

            Plutt says nothing, just whimpers. Benito holds him fast against the aluminium ridges, mouth inches from his ear.

 

"This is what is going to happen when rent is due. You come to the door and you knock. You look her in the eye. You say, 'Good morning, Miz Niima,' or you say, 'Good evening, Miz Niima'. You do  _ not  _ disturb her late at night. You say, 'I'm here to collect the rent, Miz Niima'. She gives you two hundred dollars. You say,  _ 'Thank  _ you, Miz Niima'. You turn your bastard ass around and you walk the fuck away. Do you hear me, Plutt?" Ben snarls. "Do you fucking hear me, you sack of  _ shit _ ? You say nothing else - you  _ do  _ nothing else. And I don't need to tell you that you don't run to the pigs. If you do, I will know, and I will have your mother ground into mincemeat and fed to those alley cats -  and I will come to your house in the middle of the night, and I will  _ fuck you up _ ."

 

Plutt whimpers. Ben gives him another sharp shove. The shutters clatter. "You understand me now?" Ben asks, enunciating every word carefully. "I will feed your mother to her cats and I will come to your house in the middle of the night and cut your fucking legs off. Am I clear?"

 

" _ Tak _ ," the Pole gasps. "Yes - yes."

 

Ben throws him forward so sharply so that, when he lands in the puddle, it blooms red. The man is scrambling feebly up when Ben turns the corner. 

 

_ At least the fucker’s alive _ , he thinks resentfully.

 

There is a woman in a neon pink maxi dress with half a head of ginger roots growing out of dyed crimson hair going back into the building when Ben jogs up the steps. She is carrying an open paper bag in one hand - in it, Ben sees a bag of carrots, a family-sized bag of Takis, a bar of Dove chocolate, and two porno magazines marketed towards gay men - and a vodka bottle in the other. 

 

She stares at his bloody fists. “Hi,” he says, smiling genially. “I’ll just slide in past you there.”

 

She pulls the door shut sharply. “Oh, yeah? You don’t live here.” She has a scar where she once had an eyebrow piercing and a faded tattoo of a flying saucer on her shoulder. 

 

“I’m, uh - visiting with Rey.”

 

“Yeah, not so fast, big guy.” She uses her vodka bottle to push him back. “Call her. Prove it.”

 

“What?”

 

“Call Rey. Go on, prove it. Or I’m not letting you in.”

 

Without taking his eyes from hers, Ben pulls out his phone. He understands  _ why  _ she is doing this, but he is sticky with blood and irritated. 

 

                The phone rings, and she answers almost instantly. “ _ Ben _ ?” she asks. “ _ Are you okay? Where’s Plutt _ ?”

 

“I’m fine, sweetheart, but one of your neighbours told me I gotta prove I know you before she lets me in.”

 

“Put her on loudspeaker,” the woman hisses, and Ben does.

 

“Babydoll, will you kindly let this lady know I’m not trying to break into your apartment?”

 

“ _ Who _ ?”

 

“It’s me, Rey!” the woman leans forward and bawls into the phone, as if she’s speaking over the radio. “Some guy with a big nose says he knows you! He's covered in  _ blood _ !”

 

" _ Blood? Jesus fucking -- yeah, Mara-Jade, you can let him in, it’s fine.” _

 

“Are you sure you know him?”

 

“ _ Yeah, I know him. Thanks for checking though _ .”

 

                "I won't be a minute, baby," Ben says, and hangs up.

 

                Mara-Jade lets him in. "It's a precaution," she tells him. "It's a bad area."

 

             They go up the first flight of stairs. Mara-Jade's paper bag crunches as she holds it tight to free a hand in order to hitch up her day-glo dress. 

 

               Ben grumbles,  "I figured as much."

 

               "How'd you fuck up your hands?"

 

               "I beat the fuck out of Rey's landlord."

 

               "Oh, the Russian guy? Yeah, he's a cunt. Good for you." Mara-Jade pulls her keys out of her handbag. They fly to the filthy floor and bring a tacky Hello-Kitty knife down with them.

 

                Ben reluctantly retrieves them. "You should get a sheath for that knife."

 

               "Can’t be too careful. Weird men are always trying to break in here, ‘cause we got whores living here, so as long as they don’t kill us they know the pigs won’t give a shit.”

"Yeah." They ascend the next two flights in silence. Ben makes a decision to have Rey out of this hellhole as quick as possible.

 

When they pass yet another  **OUT OF ORDER** elevator shaft, Mara-Jade asks, “So are you her boyfriend or what?”

“I don’t know. Kind of.”

 

“You should be. She deserves it. Hey, you know she got some fancy-ass job at the college last year? She brought me dinner when she got paid. She brings me dinner a lot, actually. Sweet kid. You got any cigarettes?” she asks him as they start the last flight of stairs.

 

“I don’t smoke.”

 

She looks him up and down. “You look like you got money, though.”

 

“Yeah, and I’d give it to you if I wasn’t sure you’d blow it on crack.”

 

Mara-Jade gives him a look. “I don’t live on crack, rich boy. Junkies gotta eat, too.” She snorts. “Yeah, what does a rich boy know about needing to eat? You know, Rey used to have jackshit. Nothing - I mean even less than me. No one’d hire her and she was too scared of the daddies on this block to turn tricks. She  _ still  _ gave me food and shit.”

 

When he frowns, she goes on, “Plus, I’m cold turkey now for three weeks. Lookit.” She holds out her arms, needle tracks faded. “I need to get off that shit. Hard to get off that shit when you got nothing else though.”

 

Ben sighs. “I’ll give you a hundred if you  _ promise  _ you won’t go all Requiem For A Dream on me. I don't want Rey getting upset."

 

“A hundred?” Her eyes bulge. “Jesus, I thought you were gonna say five or ten. Shit, I’ll promise for a hundred. And fuck you, I’ve seen that movie. That shit isn’t funny.”

 

“You’re right, it  _ isn’t  _ funny, so don’t do it. Get some real fucking food - and get your hair done.”

 

“I’ll  _ get  _ my fucking hair done,” she says, fumbling with her keys as Ben fishes the money out of his wallet. “Get  _ your  _ hair done. Men look stupid with long fucking hair like that. Thank youuuu.” She kisses the notes and opens the door to her apartment. "You'll go to heaven, rich boy. What's your name again?"

 

                "Ben."

 

               "You'll go to heaven, Ken," she tells him, laughing a smoker's laugh, and closes her door behind her.

 

_ Maybe,  _ he thinks, and raps on Rey' door, wiping away the sticky bloodstain.

 

               She pulls open the door and gasps. "What did you  _ do _ ?" she exclaims, grabbing his hand. His knuckles are red and will bruise, but the blood is Plutt's.

 

"Nothing, don't fuss. You got any arnica?"

 

She does - he loathes to think of why she might need it - and he applies it liberally himself. She sits on the toilet seat and watches, silent and grey, as he washes the blood down the sink. He catches sight of her in the mirror. She looks nervous, panicked.

 

"What is it, _ tesora mia _ ?" 

 

Rey swallows, fidgets, looks at the door. "Am I gonna get thrown out of here?" she whispers.

 

"What?" he exclaims, turning so sharply he splatters her with water. "Shit, sorry. No, Rey, come on. Look at me. Am I that stupid?"

 

"I don't know. You beat him up."

 

"I beat his ass because he's a fat fucking cunt and a shitty landlord.  _ And  _ I got your rent down to two hundred a month."

 

She doesn't seem to believe it. "How?"

 

He shows her one gel-covered fist. "The power of persuasion," he jibes her, and offers the other, "and charisma."

 

A smile twitches at the corner of her mouth. "I taught that motherfucker a lesson," Ben declares, drying the bottom of his hands on her towel. "And it was a long time coming, too, if you ask me." He kneels on the cold tiles before her and holds her with dry hands, jiggling her so she giggles. "Hey. Come on.  _ Smile -  _ smile for me,  _ dolcezza,  _ I feel bad." 

 

"Did you  _ really  _ beat him up?" she asks, wary. "Like, how bad?"

 

"Oh, baby, I beat the fuck out him. I cornered him in the alley behind the block and fuckin' kicked the shit out of him. I was pretending to write on the clipboard but I was really writing shit like  _ fatass ugly fucker  _ on it. Oh, shit, your clipboard!"

 

“It’s fine,” she insists.

 

“No, I’ll get you a new one. We’ll go to one of those proper places and you can get a whole new stationary set.” He kisses her tits through her shirt. "Are  _ you  _ okay?"

 

“I'm fine, I just - okay. As long as he doesn't pull anything fucking stupid, I'm fine."

 

                "Good." He stands and brings her with him.

 

               "Where are we going?" She resists.

 

               "Bedroom. You're gonna sit on my face."

 

                ---------------

               Rey has never sat on a face before. 

 

              Ben strips her, drags her onto the bed with him, lies out, prostrate, and pats her thigh to urge her onto his chest. "This is silly," she says, but wants to. She sits on his chest and looks at him. "What if you can't breathe?"

 

           "You're light as a feather,  _ bella mia,  _ don't worry."

 

             Immediately, Rey is taken by it. Ben grips her behind, tongue insistent, and she can control the speed of her grinding.

 

             "Oh-" She finds herself closer to an orgasm much quicker. "Oh - Ben - I think-"

 

             His hair is flung out like a coal-black halo behind his head, his eyes closed. Dark lashes brush his cheek. His face - or what she sees of it under her mound, her thighs - is suffused with pleasure.

            Rey comes, pulling wildly at his hair, and so he turns her over and fucks her roughly from behind until she is dripping white. She says his name, but in her post-coital stupor fumbles over it. Ben roars with muffled laughter against her cunt. "Fuck off," she gasps, and collapses. Ben brings her down to lie by him. 

 

              "Don't laugh, you have me all kind of fucked up," she complains, and puts her face on his chest to catch her breath. 

 

             He kisses her insistently, and she tastes herself.

 

             Benito chuckles, "My dad's Irish, you know - imagine how you'd fuck up  _ those  _ names when you just got finished riding my face."

 

             "I didn't know you had a - I didn't know your dad was Irish."

 

             "What, you didn't know I had a dad?" he asks, then scoffs. "Yeah, I wish. He's an ass."

 

_ But at least you  _ **_have_ ** _ one.  _ Ben goes on, "At least you know where you are with Sicilian names. Hey, you want something to eat?”

 

              She’s hungry. It’s been - she bends back to check her phone - seven hours since either of them last ate. “Yeah, I’m starved.”

 

            "What do you feel like?" 

 

            She feels strange about being this bold, this choosy. “What do  _ you _ feel like?” she asks. 

 

              He kisses her mouth and whispers against her lips, “Whatever you want,  _ bella.  _ Your wish is my command.” He’s mocking and grinning, but it makes her feel warm.

 

               Ben gives her his phone and plays with her hair as she configures it. It’s sleek, quick, and bigger than hers. There’s a locked folder beside the Play Store icon. She installs a food delivery app and browses the restaurants nearby; Italian, Chinese, Chinese, Asian fusion, Pizza, Chinese, Italian, Thai, Asian fusion, Italian. 

 

             “How about pizza?”

 

             “ _ Perfetto.  _ Get whatever you feel like.” Ben pulls her snug against his belly, hefts her leg over his solid hip, and closes his eyes, one paw curled about her calf and the other resting on her backside.

 

            She frugally adds a pepperoni pizza and garlic bread to the virtual cart; $15.20.  _ Ouch _ . “What do you want?” she asks him. He takes the phone and looks at it.

 

            “You aren’t hearing me, woman.”

 

             Fifteen dollars is absolutely nothing to him, a speck of dust in the wind. She stares at him.

 

_ Fine. If he wants his money spent so bad, spend it for him. _

 

              “No, I’m hearing you. Whatever I want, right?”

 

             “Anything. Even if you want to just  _ look  _ at it - order it. Anything.”

 

            She does. 

            A delivery girl pulls up on a red moped outside forty minutes later, and they both go down to greet her. The black zipped satchel used to keep the food hot is fit to bursting. Ben fishes several large notes from his wallet and gives them to her as nonchalantly as if he is slipping her a dollar. Rey puts on a hoodie and carries two boxes down the hall and knocks on Mara Jade's door with her elbow. Ben stands at the end of the hall and waits.

 

Mara-Jade pulls open the door with the chain on. "Oh, hi!"

 

“Hey, I have some surplus pizza if you want it.”

 

“Ooh.” She unhooks the chain and looks out properly. “What is it?”

 

"Just regular pepperoni, dough balls, and a couple of cookies."

 

"You're a star." She looks up the hall and sees Ben, who is looking at his phone, leaning up against the doorframe. “Oh, Ken!” She shakes her hair at him. “See? I did it.” She's done her hair since Rey last saw her; her entire head is vivid scarlet, and Rey can smell the floral ammonia of fresh hair dye.

 

“Yup.” He raises his eyes. “Next step is keeping it that way.”

 

"Oh, suck one, pretty boy. Rey, can I keep the dip tubs when I'm done? I want to put earrings in them."

 

"Yeah, go ahead."

 

"Cool." Mara Jade has already popped open a box and is halfway through a dough ball dripping in oil. "Thanks, you're a doll. Bye!"

 

When Rey closes her own door behind her, Ben says, "You're real sweet."

 

"Yeah, well, I figure just because she's a - a hooker - a sex worker doesn't mean she should go without decent food. Figure I can help now that I have the means, kind of."

 

They cover the bed with a blanket and eat. Rey puts something nonsensical on for them to watch on the laptop and they do not watch it. She inhales an entire pizza - bacon, pineapple, chorizo, and feta - seven dough balls, four pots of dip, and a whole box of hot cookies, revelling in the greasiness of it. 

 

               She lies half-on Ben and groans, "Fuck, that was so good."

 

              He chuckles, finishing his fifth slice. "Jesus, you can eat, girl."

             "God, I know. I love it."

 

             "Keep loving it. It'll all go to that little ass," he declares, and slaps it so that she squeals with laughter and curls into him.

 

                "The ice-cream," she whispers, like it's a secret. "I want it."

 

              "Go get it," he whispers back, and slaps her ass again as she scrambles up. 

 

                She lies there on top of him and eats half of it, the other half going in odd spoonfuls to Ben. "I'll get you proper  _ gelato _ , one day," he promises. "This is good, but you deserve better."

 

               "Get me proper everything." She luxuriates in his heat. The ice cream tub is put to the side. "I could sleep. Get me proper sleep, in a  _ Sicilian  _ bed, in  _ Sicily-" _

 

__   Benito kisses her ear. "I'll take you to Sicily." .

 

              " _ Yeah.  _ First-class …" She rolls her eyes, and he kisses her eyelids, too.

 

             "I will. You think I won't? I could have you there by this time tomorrow."

 

“How often do you go?”

 

“Every few months for a few weeks." He kisses her nose. "Come with me next time.”

 

Rey snorts. “Luke’s a good boss, but I don’t think he’ll up my wages so I can swan off to Sicily for a few weeks.” 

 

Ben focuses on his phone.

 

                “If you’re booking a plane ticket on that thing, I’m gonna slap you.”

 

“ _ Booking _ a  _ plane ticket, _ ” he repeats, disgusted. “I don’t fly commercial,  _ bella. _ ”

 

                “No? I bet United Airlines are sore as shit that your ass doesn’t  grace their seats.”

 

               “I bet. No, I got my own wings. Nice ones, too.”

 

               “Why am I not surprised?”

 

He smiles, scrolling. "I'll get Luke over. Lend him one of my people to take over where you left off for a few weeks. I  _ will _ ," he insists, when she gives him a look. "I want you with me,  _ dolcezza. _ "

 

"And my house-" She gestures around. "God knows it'll get turned into a crack den by squatters."

 

"Then move."

 

"Yeah, I'll just buy a duplex."

 

His thick dark brows knit in a heavy, disapproving frown."I'll  _ buy _ you a fucking duplex." He takes hold of her face and puts his nose to hers. "I'll buy you a fucking duplex with a pool and a car and a goddamn  _ stable  _ if that's what it takes."

 

She puts her hand around his wrist and leans into his great warm paw, though she's taken aback by his outburst. "You are going to have  _ everything, _ " he declares, and his tone is stern. He has dropped his phone to grasp her backside tightly. "Everything, anything, whatever you didn't have when you should have. You're going to be worth millions."

 

               It is easy to let him pull her shorts down to her thighs and eat her furiously while he kneels on the floor, big paws holding her in place. Rey leans on the bed and wails, whimpers. When she has climaxed twice, he hefts her onto the bed and  _ gently, slowly  _ pushes inside.

 

               " _ Bella,"  _ he groans, when he is fully seated. "Beautiful girl - you're perfect."

 

               He is heavy on her back, but warm, and a great hand comes between her legs to knead at her clitoris. Rey's face feels hot and she feels full to the brim. He puts his weight behind every thrust, rolling his hips heavy.

 

              "Let me - let me come," she gasps, when she feels she will burst. "Please."

 

               Benito does, uttering a litany of Sicilian praises as she pulsed around him, moaning into her bed. It urges him on to his orgasm, and in her oversensitivity Rey moves her hips for relief.

Ben grunts, stifling a louder sound. "Fucking Christ. Fuck, you're gorgeous, fuck. No no, babydoll, stay right there. That's it, sweetheart, that's it, good  _ girl. _ " 

 

                They spend almost an hour just  _ kissing  _ afterwards, Benito heavy with his entire body on hers, her thighs drawn up about his hips, his tongue deep in her mouth.

 

               "I'm taking you," he huffs, when they pause for breath, and peppers her neck with kisses, too. " _ In Sicilia. Ti farò piacere, tutto il giorno e tutta la notte; ti siederai sulla mia faccia tutto il giorno - bella donna - mangerò la tua bella figa ogni mattina-"  _ He goes lower and lower, nipping her shoulders.

 

                What a beautiful way he speaks, she thinks, though she understands none of it. "When?"

"How does Tuesday sound?"

 

"That's in two days, you fucker."

 

"And?"

 

She closes her eyes. "Most  people book flights months ahead. Most people save up for years to go as far away as Sicily. This is crazy."

 

Ben pulls the cup of her bralette  down finds her breast with a determined mouth. "I," he insists around her nipple, "am not most people."

 

Rey puts her hand in his hair.  _ No,  _ she thinks.  _ You're not at all.  _ He comes off the bed again, kneels.

 

__ "Think about it," he murmurs, and descends upon her cunt once more.

Benito stays the night. Rey sleeps deeply - deeper than she has in years, orgasm-tired- with her face in his chest, her leg slung over his hip. When she wakes up, he is snoring softly, almost on top of her. She did not draw her drapes the night before and so the sun half blinds her. She cranes her neck and kisses Ben's bruised knuckles.

 

               She gets her phone and googles  _ Sicily.  _

 

__ She is met with millions of images of azure strands and beaches like soft brown sugar; ancient ruins of an empire long since lost; towns built into the bony hillsides; professionally-shot pictures of enormous dishes of seafood. 

 

_ Sicily _ , the Wikipedia article says,  _ is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 20 regions of Italy. It is one of the five Italian autonomous regions, in Southern Italy along with surrounding minor islands, officially referred to as  _ **_Regione Siciliana._ **

 

****  It  _ is  _ beautiful. Rey looks at Benito's sleeping face. He's beautiful, too, serene in the sun, so still he could be hewn from Carrera marble.

 

_ Maybe.  _

 

               When he wakes, he sits her atop of his belly and fucks her slow and soft, his beautiful curls all bedraggled still. After, he goes out for twenty minutes and returns with a warm bakery box full of breakfast pastries and a bag of oranges. "You got a juicer?" he asks her, and when she tells him no, he resigns himself to making her a hot chocolate.

 

                Rey sits at the table and eats four hot croissants, getting the flaky pastry everywhere. Ben finds a bar of chocolate in her snack cupboard and melts it in hot milk on the stovetop. "Did you think about what I said?" he asks. "About Sicily."

 

              She did. She thought about getting on a plane with him -  _ his  _ plane - and crossing the sea to the island of Sicily, where the sun bakes the brown hills and where the sea and sky are both the same impossible, sparkling blue. 

 

           She thought about work, and about the apartment. She thought about being frightened of leaving, even just for two months, but thought, too, about being with Ben.

 

            "Yeah," she says, mouth full of pastry. Ben looks at her.

            "Well?"

 

            "I think - well, I think I'd like to. To go. With you."

 

            He abandons the stove and kisses her; kisses her face, her hair, her lips. "My - beautiful - girl," he growls, a word for every kiss. "You'll love it. You'll  _ love  _ it." He is only stopped from fucking her on the table by the  _ HISS  _ of the milk bubbling over onto the stove.

            While Rey sips at her hot chocolate - Ben covers it artfully in cream from a can and a crumbled cookie -  he makes a phone call in the bathroom. She doesn't listen, occupied with a buttery  _ pain au chocolat,  _ but when Ben emerges he says, gravely, "Call Luke."

 

            She nearly chokes. "Why? What did you do?"

 

            "Nothing. I just got you your two weeks off."

            She has to ring twice before he answers. "Hey, Luke, I-"

             " _ Ben told me. _ " He doesn't sound angry. " _ I figured. _ "

 

             "Oh."

__

_              "You get two weeks, Miss Thing, so enjoy it." _

 

_              " _ Does this come out of my annual leave, or-"

 

             He sighs. " _ No - you think Ben would let me get away with that? Two weeks, off the books. You better come back with a shit-ton of snacks for the office, or you're fired." _

 

             Ben watches her absentmindedly, and goes to sit by the window. Rey leans her head back onto the cupboard, relieved, grinning. "I will. Thanks, Luke."

 

_             "We're gonna have the mid-semester tour rush hit by then, so you won't be getting two-week vacations again this side of the year. I don't want some silent smarmy shithead droning on about the Pleistocene and driving people away." _

 

__  "I'll be back by then, I promise."

 

            " _ Yeah, yeah. Go on, go do what you're doing. Oh, and Rey - remember what I said." _

 

__   "I will. Bye."

 

            Rey hangs up, and Ben snarks, "Soft touch."

 

           "You  _ wanted  _ him to say yes!"

 

           "Bah. Come here."

 

           She goes to him. They sit by the window and share the hot chocolate in the sparse sun, the cool light. Her chest feels light for the first time in so long; she has enough. Enough money, enough food, enough space.  _ Enough. _

 

            Rey puts her face close to his and simply breathes.

 

__

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


> __

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations
> 
> BELLA / BELLA MIA: beauty / my beauty (feminine)
> 
> DIO / DIO MIO: God / my god
> 
> ZIO: uncle
> 
> SICUREZZA: Safety
> 
> BELLISSIMA: Beautiful / gorgeous (feminine)
> 
> DOLCEZZA / DOLCEZZA MIA: Sweetling / sweet one (feminine)
> 
> RAGAZZA: girl
> 
> BUONGIORNO: good morning
> 
> CIAO: hello / goodbye
> 
> PERFETTA / PERFETTI: Perfect (feminine) / perfect (plural)
> 
> SFARZOSA: flawless, impeccable
> 
> PICCOLA PESCA: Little peach
> 
> AMORE: Love
> 
> TESORA MIA: my treasure (feminine)
> 
>  
> 
> Phrases:
> 
>  
> 
> _Sono perfetti. Sono bella. _\- They're perfect. They're beautiful.__  
> .
> 
>  
> 
> __  
> __  
> _In Sicilia. _\- To Sicily__  
>   
>   
> 
> __  
> __  
> __  
> __  
> _Ti farò piacere, tutto il giorno e tutta la notte; ti siederai sulla mia faccia tutto il giorno - bella donna - mangerò la tua bella figa ogni mattina-"_  
>   
> 
> 
> _"I will please you all day and all night; you will sit on my face all day - beautiful woman - I will eat your beautiful pussy every morning-"_   
>    
>    
>    
>    
> 

**Author's Note:**

>  _Signore:_ \- Sir  
>  _Per favore:_ \- Please
> 
>  **Granita:** \- Sicilian iced coffee, but full of ice shards, and topped with whipped cream.  
>  **Carabinieri:** \- Italian military police.  
> \- State police of Italy.
> 
> Short prologue, but seeing as there's only gonna be 15 chapters, they'll be at least 5k each. Pray for me.


End file.
